


Moiety

by heauxseoks



Category: Pentagon (Korea Band)
Genre: Adachi Yuto - Freeform, Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst, Art, C9, Changgu is a horticulture major, Flowers, Fluff, Gardens, H9, Kang Hyunggu - Freeform, Kang Kino, Love, M/M, Pentagon, Plot Twist, Read till the end to know what it is i swear its rlly good, Romance, Wooseok is a Criminal psychology major, Yan An - Freeform, Yan An is a medicine student, Yanan - Freeform, Yeo Changgu - Freeform, Yeo One - Freeform, Yuto - Freeform, Yuto is a fine arts major, but lots of angst as well, it’s a happy ending i swear on my life, kino - Freeform, lots of fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-09-10
Packaged: 2018-12-20 23:29:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11931597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heauxseoks/pseuds/heauxseoks
Summary: Moiety (n.)[moi-i-tee]One of two equal parts-----Yuto befriends the energetic and smiley Kang Hyunggu with his haunted eyes and quivering hands while helping Changgu out with a delivery and learns three very important things:1) He has a pet cat named Neko2) He doesn’t like to be touchedand3) Yuto wants to kiss him very very very badly





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like there’s a severe lack of a) Pentagon fics b) Yuto x Hyunggu fics so here’s my first contribution to this fandom! I hope you like it because I really enjoyed writing this piece :^) please support them this comeback!!! (Please continue to stream, support and vote for Like This!!)

“You’re a fake Aquarius.”

Yuto sighs,  _very loudly_. The older boy, on the other hand, chooses to ignore this reaction and rolls himself into a more comfortable position, holding up the magazine so that Yuto can see it’s battered and misused front page. He wonders- for a brief moment- why Changgu enjoyed reading horoscopes so much. The first time they’d met he’d incorrectly guessed him as an Aries- which he’d later realise was more insulting than funny. But Yuto doesn’t mind it when Changgu randomly tells him that he’s not a true Aquarius, he only minds it when he’s crashing his dorm room at three in the morning because he’s  _bored_.

And Changgu bores easily. 

Hence why he’s sprawled all over Yuto’s bed while he sits on the floor, sleep still carved deeply into his eyes. He’s struggling to keep himself awake and the only thing that’s helping is the fact that Changgu’s never stopped talking. 

It’s been forty minutes. 

Yuto adjusts his position, getting more comfortable because his ass was beginning to hurt and his feet were starting to go numb. He thinks he’s going to lose all sensation in them if he doesn’t at least get up (which wasn’t going to be possible at the rate this one-sided conversation is going).

Changgu shifts again, rolling over the sheets until he’s on his back, holding the abused print material over his face. The pages are soft like cloth and folded, creating white creases where colour used to be. Yuto almost hopes he loses grip and the magazine comes crash landing on his face. 

Then again, he’d start screaming so Yuto changes his mind- he hopes Changgu miraculously falls asleep. 

He wishes. Changgu looks like he’d gulped down four mugs of coffee in one go.

“Your character doesn’t match  _any_  of these Aquarius traits,” Changgu begins to explain, his voice travelling and bouncing back against the magazine so Yuto has to crane his neck to catch what he’s saying, “You should be a Virgo.”

“Okay,” Yuto finally groans with a pull of his brows, his tone dull like an overused knife, “and I care because?”

“ _Because_ ,” Changgu pulls the word, stretching it like a rubber band before releasing it with a smack, “It’s interesting.”

Yuto scoffs. Interesting his ass. 

Changgu is running. 

And he guesses, because Yan An’s not returning to the dorms for the night. 

It’s always loneliness that Changgu runs from. This isn’t the first time he’s come crashing into his dorm in the middle of the night, waking him up with a jolt and keeping him up for the rest of it. But Yuto is understanding because it’s all in Changgu’s eyes. The sadness, the desperation. The need to fill silence with stupid conversations. He’s lonely without Yan An and empty without him. They came together like a pair of socks or a heartbeat. They needed each other to survive, perhaps, one more than the other.

Changgu is desperately in love with his roommate but is too dumb to do anything about it.

He plays it off like a joke, though Yuto would take lovesick Changgu over heartbroken Changgu any day. (The latter had the tendency for the overdramatic and Yuto wasn’t in the mood to deal with that without Wooseok). 

So Yuto bears with a numb ass and prickly feet and an achy back at three in the fucking morning. 

“Hyung,” he says with a wide circular yawn, “I’m tired.”

“You are?” Changgu returns, rolling again so that his face is levelled with Yuto’s. His cheeks are stained pink, his lashes batting innocently as though he hadn’t purposely intended to crash the younger’s room at an ungodly hour. Yuto nods his head, lifting his fists to rub his eyes until he sees specks of vibrant colour bloom behind his eyelids. 

“It’s almost been an hour,” he knows his voice is teetering on whiny but he can’t help it. He’s exhausted and all he wants to do is curl under his covers and fall asleep. If Wooseok were here he’d have pacified Changgu but Wooseok’s at the university library doing up last minute assignments because he has no concept of time management. (Damn him.)

“Oh,” Changgu’s lips pull and his gaze dips. Yuto catches the little shake in his wrists, “I didn’t realise.”

Sleepy Yuto is a little caustic so he almost says,  _Of course you didn’t,_  but he catches himself the last minute- also because he accidentally moved his prickly foot and the sudden jolt of pins and needles into his ass is making him feel very weird.

“I feel, like you’re here because you want something from me.” Yuto says instead, kicking his foot out and shaking it to dispel the discomfort. It started to click a little too late in his sleepy brain. Changgu comes to him to put out his loneliness, but he also came to him when he needed something because Yuto rarely ever said no to favours.

And this conversation about horoscopes is a repeated parrot. He’d heard this very same one several times before already.

Changgu blows out a breath a little too loudly, eyes shifting, “ _No._ ”

Yuto narrows his eyes at the other boy. Changgu’s lower lip pushes out and he’s looking at him with those damned puppy eyes, Yuto almost feels bad for not trusting him. _Almost_. Because Changgu confesses, “Okay so, like, I made a promise to someone to deliver something tomorrow but then I  _accidentally_  said yes to lunch with Yan An.” before he could second guess his intentions and write it off as just blatant mistrust.

Yuto blinks. 

 _Accidentally_  his ass. The idiot probably jumped right out of his skin when Yan An asked.

He’s a lost cause. Staying up at three in the morning on a school night had been a waste of his time. Yuto is sleepy and cranky and the bloody pins and needles in his foot is making his butt feel prickly. He presses his palm into his face and groans.

“And I’m supposed to help you? _”_

Changgu whines, pushing himself into a sitting position so suddenly he bounces on the bed, “You’re the only one that’s free tomorrow!”

“Who said so?” God, he’d planned to make a trip to the art store and stock up on some pastels. His fingers were itching to use them after weeks of watercolour.

_“Please.”_

“No.” He stands up, knees cracking. Changgu’s gaze follows him with that same pout in place, his brows creasing together. 

Really, damn him, because Yuto’s a bit soft for his friend. He can’t say no to him with conviction, not when he’s looking at him like that. People often assume Yuto to be cold and unfriendly- which was true depending on the situation- and in that moment he really freaking wished that that was true. 

In actuality, he’s just too nice for his own good. 

“Okay,  _fine_.” He grunts, poking Changgu in the forehead. The older boy’s eyes brighten, like there’s a bulb lit from behind them. They’re sparkling and Yuto remembers why Changgu is extremely dangerous. 

He’s never encountered an instance where Changgu didn’t get his way. 

“I love you,” he says, throwing his arms around Yuto’s neck suddenly, almost causing the taller boy to lose balance and end up with a brain injury, “I’ll buy you those watercolours you’ve always wanted.”

Yuto only scoffs. Changgu probably couldn’t afford it- not with his meagre pay from making Subway sandwiches five times a week. Even so, Yuto pats his friend’s back because he can feel the excitement radiating off of him like intense heat. 

It makes saying yes and staying up all night worth it. 

“ _See_ ,” Changgu laughs and it’s warm and sickly sweet and Yuto can’t help but smile, “told you that you’re a fake Aquarius.”

\-----

Yuto is  _never_  and he  _means never_  going to agree to do favours for Yeo Changgu ever again. It’s one thing to hand over a shady looking package and another to send him all the way over to the strange garden beside campus with vague instructions to “Pass it to the uncle there.” 

Yuto’s only ever walked by the place but he knew a lot of his classmates went there to reference flowers.

He’s never really enjoyed drawing nature so he stayed away from the garden, but he’s heard that it’s beautiful and run by a mysterious old man who never left the place. 

Plus the sun’s at it’s peak and he can feel it sear into the side of his face- perhaps wearing a black t-shirt wasn’t the brightest decision he’s ever made but he enjoyed the colour too much to bother about changing it for the weather.

The package has weight to it. It’s firm in his hands and a little heavy. Changgu had made sure to wrap whatever was inside in multiple layers. Yuto can feel the bubble wrap and if he presses further, his fingers brush against something hard. There’s no name written on the package either, just brown paper and taped without much care for precision and aesthetics. It was a hideous looking parcel in Yuto’s not-so-humble opinion.

Just before he reaches the entrance of the garden his phone buzzes and he stops to fumble with his pockets to retrieve the device. He isn’t surprised to see that the caller’s the very person he’s going to curse out tonight.

“ _Yuto,”_  comes Changgu’s optimistic and bright voice. Yuto thinks his voice is like the colour yellow, there’s something summery about it- like there are flecks of golds and sunlight in it. When Changgu’s happy Yuto almost feels like his voice makes everyone around him warm and safe, “Are you on your way?”

He feels a bead of perspiration drip down between his shoulder blades, “Unfortunately, yes.”

“You know I love you right?”

Yuto rolls his eyes and then because Changgu can’t possibly see the action, he blows out a breath, elongating it for additional effect. 

He’s smiling though, lips almost reaching his eyes because as much as he loved annoying the shit out of Changgu, he treasured him a lot more than he let on. He can already imagine the look on the older guy’s face- corners of his mouth pulled down and lower lip pressed up against his top one. “You know you owe me right?” Yuto mirrors, the antistasis of Changgu’s statement.

Yuto doesn’t  _actually_ expect anything from him. He knows how hard Changgu works just to be able to pay for university. He knows that behind his deep chocolate eyes is tiredness and emptiness and he will never let anyone find out.

Except at 3AM when the dorms got quiet and Yan An wasn’t in his room. Except at 3AM when only ghosts listened to his silent cries. 

Except at 3AM when he crawls into Yuto’s room and passes off sadness for a need to remind Yuto that he’s the least Aquarius person he’s ever met.

“Anyway,” he starts walking again, adjusting the package so it’s clamped securely between his arm and body, “Let me go deliver this package.”

“Thank you,” Changgu’s voice is breathy and soft like the wings of a butterfly, “Seriously.”

Yuto pulls his lips into his mouth, bites down, releases, “See you later, hyung.”

The gardens come into view, there’s an iron fence running the perimeter and a very large plaque built between long grass that read  _THE ORIENTAL GARDENS._  He eyes several blue butterflies fluttering between bushes and trees, he wouldn’t be able to name them but Changgu would. He’s sure that this package had something to do with his major- Horticulture.

Thank god Changgu wasn’t one of those people running around screaming about saving the bees because Yuto’s pretty sure he’d have cut off all ties with him if he did. He’d once met an Art major who claimed that capitalism was ruining artists’ creativity and so went on strike by not eating for a week. 

His lecturer found the idiot passed out in the studio and had called for both an ambulance and a psychiatrist for an evaluation.

He steps into the gardens and he’s overcome with awe.

It’s fucking magnificent.

There are colours everywhere- flora he can’t name in blues and purples and reds and oranges. There were pure species and hybrids and butterflies and ladybugs and Yuto feels like the breath’s been knocked right out of his lungs. He can feel the twitch in his fingers, the pull of creativity and direction and within him, a part aches to pick up some pencils or charcoal and begin sketching. When his classmates told him about how beautiful and magical the gardens were he never believed them because Yuto found the most beauty in people. He loved the haunting inside humanity and he loved to draw that out with his work- but this garden tugged him in a very different way.

This garden made him want to capture it’s purity, it’s vibrancy and Yuto wants to answer this call. He stops for a moment, just stunned into silence at his surroundings.

When he reaches out to finger a leaf it’s velvety and firm and thick in his careful grasp. And he does something he doesn’t think he’d ever think he would do: he leans in to smell the flowers. They’re fragrant and sweet, its scent wrapping around him like a light scarf.

For the first time Yuto can see why Changgu loved nature so much, it could be absolutely stunning. And thinking of Changgu only reminded him that he needed to deliver a package to a questionable old man.

There’s more to the garden than flowers and ferns and trees. Yuto eyes a large pond and a small bridge leading to a pavilion and several areas for people to sit down and admire nature at. There’s also a nicely angled slope of grass overlooking the pond that he reckons people could picnic on.

But he’s also miserably lost. He’s sure that he has to find a small house deep within the place, but the board with the map of the entire garden wasn’t very helpful. He’d tried to figure out where to go from the little marker reading _YOU ARE HERE_ , but the little drawings peppered across the map only confused him.

He figures that it was worth wandering around anyway. The garden seemed to fill him with new energy so he could spend some time admiring its beauty without feeling rushed (of course, unless the sky started to bleed indigo, then he would know that he’s screwed).

But there’s only so much walking he can do. Fifteen minutes later his feet are aching and his lungs are burning. It’s so hot his shirt is sticking to his body like second skin.

He’s also back to grumbling about never doing favours for Yeo Changgu ever again.

He thinks the gods have answered his prayers when he sees something amidst a patch of tall grass and when he squints to get a better look he’s very sure it’s a person. 

Good, finally  _someone_  who can help his lost ass.

“Uh, excuse me?” he asks, and he knows he’s being gentle because he’s asking very uncertainly (as would anyone do when approaching a stranger) but the person jumps up, whirling around so quickly Yuto almost gets whiplash before losing his balance and landing inside the grass with a scream. Yuto’s so taken aback he can’t do anything but gawk at the person as the person stares back with wide eyes, his bangs blown away from his forehead and his chest rising and falling erratically. 

They’re like this for a few breaths, both equally shocked and both equally rooted to their spots.

“I’m sorry,” he says quickly, his heart in his throat from the sudden shock, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

The person doesn’t respond- at least not at first- because he’s still staring back at Yuto with that confused, almost baffled expression on his face. If the situation didn’t seem so ridiculous, Yuto would have probably run away. Times like these he almost wishes Changgu was here because he’d know  _exactly_ what to say. Yuto’s just tall, lanky and awkward. He wasn’t cut out for meeting new people and scaring the shit out of them unintentionally.

“Uh,” the person starts, his expression morphing to look at Yuto peculiarly, “You can see me?”

Yuto blinks, completely lost. He almost wants to say,  _of course I can see you, I have two functional eyeballs_ but he doesn’t think that that would help the current situation or thaw the sudden block of ice that’s come between them.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he repeats again, feeling heat rise into his cheeks. His face is bright red and he feels so lost and out of place.

“No, no it’s okay,” the person responds quickly, waving one hand about dismissively. Yuto’s eyes latch on to his delicate wrists, down to the curve of bone and then to long and slender fingers with perfectly clipped nails. There’s something almost ethereal about this person, a softness and hardness to his features. His thick brows should not work with his soft cheeks and his bright aura shouldn’t match with the severity of his jaw and his troubled gaze shouldn’t be making Yuto’s chest feel heavy and light at the same time. He would reach out and help him up but Yuto can’t seem to stop looking at the stranger’s face and his brain just  _won’t work._

“I was looking for my cat, Neko.” he admits abashedly, moving so that he was on his knees before rising up to his full height. He’s shorter than Yuto, but there was just something to him that made him seem bigger than all of the universe combined.

“You named your cat,  _Cat?”_  Yuto asks instinctively with a pull of his brows. It seemed to be the  _right_  thing to say because the thick glass wall between them shatters like he’d just crashed right into it and  _god,_  this guy’s smile seemed to light up every dark place in Yuto’s soul.

“Okay I’m not  _the most_  creative person in the world- oh,” he stops suddenly, his eyes widening, “Did you need something?”

Yuto thinks he’s looking at the personification of starlight and he really doesn’t know what to say suddenly.

“Are you delivering a package?” the person asks, gaze darting to the contents in Yuto’s arm and it’s the shadow that crosses his face that pulls Yuto out of his stupor. There’s something there, hidden behind his gaze that piques his curiosity.

“Yes actually,” he says, shifting the package so his grip on it is more comfortable, “I’m looking for the gardener?”

The person smiles, but his lips are tight and so is his gaze, “If you help me find my cat I’ll bring you to him.”

Yuto frowns.

“Trust me, it’s easier finding The Gardener than it is the smelly old cat.”

And for some strange reason, perhaps it was the summery day or the way the stranger’s eyes were looking at him like they could hold all of Yuto’s soul in it or the fact that when he spoke Yuto thought his voice was a creamy lavender, Yuto decides that he’ll help him.

 

\-----


	2. Chapter 2

“Are you a university student?” the guy asks, ducking under a wooden bench while muttering, “Neko, Neko, Neko,” under his breath like a rhythm. Yuto eyes the back of his head, noting a head full of thick black hair that shone almost blue under the sun.

“Uh, yeah.” Yuto’s also a little startled by how casual and easy going this stranger is. It took no time for him to warm up to the awkward Japanese boy and was conversing with him as though they’d been friends for years.

“Cool,” he huffs as he stands up, dusting his brown pants and then his hands, “What’s your major?”

Yuto reaches out to scratch behind his ear, it’s been a while since anyone’s been curious about him. Yuto’s not exactly an interesting person, he mostly kept to himself and did his own thing and perhaps the only interesting thing about him was that he enjoyed drawing.

Shinwon, his senior, insists that he communicates the best through his art. Whatever words he could never say, he drew. _It’s a gift_ , he’d say, _something very rare and very precious._

Yuto didn’t see it, but he accepted it because if he were to disagree Shinwon would annoy the crap out of him. All the bugger wanted was for all his friends to be happy.

“Fine arts,” Yuto says softly, so softly that he doesn’t think this stranger heard him but he does because he turns his head to face him and his eyes are glistening brown.

Yuto feels something in his chest shift and he feels like he’s capsizing, about to drown in those eyes and surrender his soul to it.

He averts his gaze quickly.

“A lot of fine arts majors come to this garden,” the guy says, almost nostalgically, “You’re the first one I’ve ever spoken to. I’m Kang Hyunggu by the way,” he grins and Yuto’s almost jealous of his perfect smile.

The kind of smile that put an end to wars and brought men to their knees.

“Adachi Yuto.”

“Anyway how did you know I named my cat, Cat?” Hyunggu shoves his hands into his pockets as he says this, his steps beginning to become lighter until he’s kicking as he’s walking. He looks so relaxed, so at ease.

Peaceful. Yuto feels at peace looking at this guy, as though he lit up every dark room he walked into.

“I’m Japanese,” Yuto deadpans and Hyunggu stops for a moment, a shy laugh filling the taller boy’s ears.

“Oh right. _Adachi Yuto_ is definitely a Japanese name.”

Yuto can’t help but smile at this, his chin dipping as he does so.

“Anyway Neko’s a stubborn thing. She only responds to food and _Princess Neko_ ,” he says with a shake of his head, “It’s nice meeting you by the way.”

Yuto breathes in, “Uh... same to you.”

And Hyunggu’s smiling like  _that_ again, like there is an entire galaxy created out of it, like he is being sucked into a black hole and Yuto doesn’t know what to do with all of these sudden feelings crashing into him like a meteorite missing its trajectory. 

There’s a secret in his gaze, hidden and tucked away in the corners of his eyes for no one to find and the more Yuto looks at him, the more Yuto lingers in his shadow as he searches for his cat, the more Yuto tries to wrap his mind around him he can feel a pull like a magnetic field toward him.

A moth to a flame and he is acutely aware of how much he will burn if he pondered about those haunted eyes.

But he can’t not answer this call, he wants to capture that darkness in Hyunggu’s eyes, the poltergeist living inside his eyes.

Eyes like two drops of coffee. 

“Neko! Neko!” he continues to call, his voice dipping from bright and cheerful into frustrated and tired, “God this cat.”

They wander around for a while longer until Yuto asks to rest, the soles of his feet are aching and his clothes are almost like second skin to him. Hyunggu leads him to an empty bench overlooking a pond and they settle down, Yuto huffing out a breath and leaning back and Hyunggu pulling his feet up and wrapping his arms around them. The taller boy can feel his gaze settling heavily against the side of his face and turns to look at him, his eyebrows raising.

“You,” Hyunggu starts to say and Yuto catches the little tremble of his lips, the little shake in his hands, “Never mind.”

It’s silent, and Yuto’s almost sure that his heartbeat is audible even for miles away, heart jumping between the sky and the ground, rocking like a pendulum.

And then they hear a meow- or rather, to Yuto it sounded more like a demand for attention.

He turns his head at the same time Hyunggu does and a pure obsidian feline comes into view, it’s serene green eyes peering at the duo with calculation. It meows again and Yuto watches the sun shine.

Because Hyunggu grins so wide Yuto is convinced that he is actually the sun.

“Neko!”

Yuto’s not sure why he imagined  _Neko_ to be a white cat with orange and black dots, but looking at the actual cat takes him by surprise. It’s almost like it regarded itself as royalty, walking lithely and carefully as though it owned the place.

The cat hops on to the bench and Hyunggu changes position so that he could scratch the cat’s head and once again, Yuto’s attention is locked on his delicate fingers, long and slender and very gentle.

He’s overcome with the strangest desire to slip his fingers into Hyunggu’s hand. What would it feel like?

How well would it fit in his?

Instead he curls his fingers into tight balls, watching the way Hyunggu played with the cat, chiding it under his breath softly like a breeze. Yuto holds his breath, his fingers twitching.

He wishes he had his sketchpad so he could immortalise Kang Hyunggu inside of it with careful strokes and details. He’d draw his eyes first- capturing the torment and softness in them before moving on to the rest of him. It was the eyes that were most important.

“Oh yeah you need to hand the package over to The Gardener!” Hyunggu suddenly perks and Yuto’s gaze darts to the sky hastily, his cheeks heating up, “I’ll take you.”

And Hyunggu leads him once again, this time it’s quieter, heavier. Hyunggu brings Yuto past a field of daisies and another filled with tulips of every colour imaginable. They don’t talk, but Yuto feels like Hyunggu’s telling him something very important.

He just doesn’t know what.

“He’s over there,” Hyunggu says finally, lifting a finger to point at a house hidden behind thick trees. It’s rundown and old looking, hidden away in darkness for no one to see and find, “You can just go in.”

“Thank you,” Yuto says, smiles with his lips together and walks around the pale boy. He keeps walking, refusing to turn back to see if he’s still standing there watching him go on.

Because there should be no reason for him to do so. There should be no reason for Yuto’s chest to be tight and empty. There should be no reason for him to be thinking of a velvety voice the colour of lavender or a smile that contained the entire cosmos inside of it.

The gardener is inside when he knocks- a questionable looking old man with a hardened gaze and a lipless scowl. He accepts the package without a word and Yuto ducks out of the house quickly. There was something about the place that made him feel uncomfortable and he’d only realised after Hyunggu left his side.

When he goes back out the boy’s no longer there and there’s nothing to indicate that he ever was.

And sometimes Yuto feels the same way.

\----- 

Hyunggu can’t keep his heart from violently dancing inside of his chest.

He knows he’s being stupid, but  _really_ it couldn’t be helped. It’s been so long since he’s conversed with anyone and it made his blood rush in his body like he was running a marathon for the first time. Hyunggu almost feels giddy with excitement. From the moment Yuto had approached him, he knew something was changing.

It was in the air, in the sweet scent of all the flowers in the garden. An electricity in his lungs.

He grins into the sun, letting its heat wash over his skin softly.

Yuto is very good looking.

There’s something about the synergy of his face that’s simply fascinating. From the slender almond arches of his eyes, to the straightness of his brows and the slight slant of his thin nose and curved lips. He looked severe and unfriendly at times, but he glowed like fire and whenever he smiled- god, _god_ it was like the fucking sun was between his teeth.

Hyunggu caught him smiling a few times while they’d been walking and every time he did, every harsh line in his face disappeared into soft curves and Hyunggu felt like he was being gripped by his neck. 

When Yuto wasn’t smiling he looked like he could damn the world, but when he was- Hyunggu is certain he could probably save the entire galaxy. 

But he lurked behind him like a shadow, which Hyunggu found a little strange.  _He_ was the one that usually lingered behind people and carefully observed the world around him, not intending to intervene when he could. He had the subtle presence of air, and he liked to keep it that way. Hyunggu’s spent enough time in this garden to know the different people that came and went, their presence only lingering for a millisecond before they became a distant memory.

And he’s come across many people like Adachi Yuto- quiet, peaceful, shy. But there was just, there was just something  _about him_ that made Hyunggu want to reach out and curl his fingers into his hair and breathe in his scent. 

Yuto smelled like paint, and Hyunggu had guessed his major long before asking him the question. But thinking about Yuto also filled Hyunggu with heaviness and as he settles down on a patch of grass and allows Neko to crawl into his lap with a dissonant meow- he knows that there are some boundaries he cannot cross.

And that included Adachi Yuto.  _Especially_ Adachi Yuto.

“You think we’ll meet again?” Hyunggu asks out loud, his voice shooting into the air only to fade into nothingness. Neko purrs as his fingers absently scratch along the underside of her chin, “Unlikely.”

He feels the cat shift in his lap as his hands stroke along her obsidian body, “But,”

And the tightness in his chest intensifies, crawling from a tiny spot in his heart to his shoulders and down to his stomach. It’s hard to breathe like this, hard to breathe when reality crushes every bit of him, leaving him battered and broken and torn. He’s aching.

He’s been aching for years.

Sensing the sudden shift in his mood Neko pauses, tilting her head up to face him. But Hyunggu’s gaze is miles away, eons away, worlds away. He stares at the gardens, at the plethora of flora, at the harmony of colours that came together to create one magnificent image. And amidst the greens and reds and purples he sees humans wandering aimlessly about.

Hyunggu wants to see Yuto again, even though he knows he shouldn’t. Even though he knows it’s just wishful thinking.

Even if it’s going against all the rules he’s made for himself. He wants to see Yuto because Yuto could see him. It was in his gaze, a silent understanding. The knowledge of unspoken words that hung thickly between people. And  _god,_ his hands. Long, delicate, slender.

Hands made for painting. 

Hyunggu wanted to latch on to them desperately. But he shouldn’t. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t. 

So he sighs again, bringing his gaze to the cat and running the pads of his fingers over the top of her head even as she stared back with placid emerald eyes. Hyunggu tells himself that he’ll forget about Adachi Yuto, the same way that he’ll probably forget about him too.

Hyunggu would just become a distant memory, a story to tell. A story forgotten.

A ghost.

“Even if we did meet again,” Hyunggu tells Neko, his voice gravelly and soft, “I think my secrets will consume me.”

The cat cocks his head and jumps from his lap and Hyunggu closes his eyes.

And there’s nothing but pain and agony from terrible secrets behind his closed lids.

\----- 


	3. Chapter 3

Yuto feels kind of stupid.

Which is, not a very uncommon feeling for him. He’s felt stupid plenty of times- like when he’d accidentally ordered spicy food at the cafeteria because he’d misread the menu and finished the entire thing crying himself red or when he’d passed out pissed drunk at one of Shinwon’s parties and had woken up with a dick drawn on his forehead and wrapped tightly around Wooseok.

(He’d never hear the end of that from his friends for the next few months).

But right now, Yuto feels like stupidest he’s ever been, standing at the entrance to  _THE ORIENTAL GARDENS_ with his fingers wrapped tightly around his bag of art supplies and sketchpad shoved under his arm. No matter how many times he tells himself that he’s here for the flowers he knows the real truth.

Kang Hyunggu.

But he can’t just waltz into the garden and look like he’d spent the entire night thinking about the ratio of his face or the way his skin glinted under the sun or how his hair looked so fluffy and soft so he’d  _had_ to come up with some sort of excuse.

(Or how much the thought of kissing him actually sounded really good).

Thank the fucking lord Hyunggu had asked him what his major was. It gave him enough of an excuse (albeit pathetic) to go see him. He could always pass it off as an assignment or that he just felt inspired to paint nature.

Truth is, Yuto wanted to draw Hyunggu but he couldn’t just  _ask_ him, not after one meeting where he’d spent most of the time lingering behind and trying to find a missing cat.

He takes in a deep breath, feeling the air cut into his lungs. He’s going to look more stupid if he kept standing in front of the gates of the garden instead of walking in so he tightens the grip on his tools and enters.

He doesn’t see Hyunggu at first, just several other people wandering the paths and gazing at the flowers. It’s slightly more lively than it had been the day before, with people peppering the paths and walking in pairs or groups. There’s a buzz in the air, almost like static energy and it rubs finely against Yuto’s skin.

Yuto hears the cat first, inclining his head to make sure that it was _actually_ the feline and not something else but he sees something charcoal against grass and he’s sure it’s exactly what he’d thought it to be.

The cat- Neko- trotting elegantly toward him. It must must recognise who he was because it stops for a moment, lifting it’s head to eye him carefully. Yuto reckons that he’s meant to bend down and play with it, but he’s awkward and his hands are full so he struggles a bit before dropping everything and kneeling down.

The fucking cat has the audacity to trot away and Yuto remembers that life is bitter and bad things happen to good people all the time.

(He’s upset he got rejected by a cat).

The presumptuous feline stops a distance away and turns back to face him before continuing on it’s merry way. Yuto sighs, picking up his stuff.

It’s dumb, but he follows the cat- right through densely populated areas of the gardens and past viewing spots and pavilions until the trees and plants got wilder and thicker. He thinks about how private this part of the of the gardens were and how it would be perfect for him to settle down with a cup of warm coffee and his materials and begin sketching.

The thick shrubbery eventually gives way to a nicely angled slope, exactly where just the most perfect amount of sunshine shone through. He’s awestruck for a moment, pausing even as the cat trudged on.

And he sees him, seated on the slope, his knees pulled up to his chest and arms wrapped around them. He’s staring into nothingness, a forlorn look plastered across his face. Yuto sees the sadness in him, the poltergeist hidden in his gaze.

He wants to reach out and smoothen every crease on his face.

But all of a sudden Yuto’s shy and awkward and he doesn’t know what to do with himself  _and has his arms always been this long?_

He can still make an escape, all he has to do is duck away as swiftly and lithely as he can manage and Hyunggu wouldn’t have seen him. He’d be able to avoid a potentially embarrassing situation if he just... turned around and ran...

The bloody cat shrieks and Yuto knows he’s doomed, body half turned and legs in ready position to break out into a run if it really came down to it. 

Hyunggu turns his head and for a moment, Yuto thinks that he’s dead. He must be because there is no way in heaven or in hell someone could look at him  _that way._ Not with a smile promising eternities and forever, not with eyes that lit up like there was a light behind them.

Yuto thinks Hyunggu is the most beautiful person he’s ever seen.

“Yuto!” he says, his entire body springing into a jump and then he’s standing up, his body inclined to the sky, his heels off the ground and he’s waving like someone would in an emergency- wildly, carelessly, desperately. Yuto’s heart skids to a stop and he’s caught in Hyunggu’s grip, right around his throat.

He could feel an incipient feeling tugging at his heartstrings and he holds his breath, warning signs blaring red and blue in his brain. They warn him that he’s making a mistake, that staying anywhere near this ebullient boy was going to bring him more harm than good. But Yuto can’t just walk away, so he just smiles back and walks toward him.

Hyunggu’s features are just as beautiful as Yuto remembered it to be, radiant and soft. But his eyes, the dreadful poltergeist in his eyes, has clamped itself firmly there. Like this, Yuto can make out things he hadn’t noticed. Like how Hyunggu was very pale, like he’d been born out of milk and how his cheeks appeared a bit sullen like someone had carved parts of it out of his face. Or how his gaze appeared listless, his eyes surrounded by deep purples and blues.

He’s shivering as well, rubbing his arms even though it’s really hot as fuck.

“I didn’t think you’d come back,” Hyunggu says and his voice is mellifluous and rich, like warm chocolate and he’s smiling like  _that_ again, like he knew the power he held over Yuto.

The Japanese boy coughs a little, his tongue’s thick and dry in his mouth and just mumbles, “I wanted to paint.”

This seems to pique Hyunggu’s interest because his eyes light up and so does his face and Yuto is certain he’s staring directly into the damned sun. “Do you know what you’re going to paint?”

“Not,” Yuto really needs to get his shit together, “Really.”

“You could paint me,” Hyunggu teases, chuckling while Yuto has an internal crisis before saying, “I’m joking.”

Yuto’s certain the universe hates the shit out of him. 

Hyunggu shouldn’t be  _this_ easygoing. He shouldn’t be talking to him like they’ve been friends for years, or destined to meet. He shouldn’t be putting his chin on his knees and lifting his coffee eyes to look at Yuto in such an endearing way. 

Yuto doesn’t know what to do with all of these feelings and he’s  _falling, falling, falling._ Crashing and burning at a million miles per hour, tearing himself apart like paper.

Quietly, Yuto pulls out his sketchpad and flips the pages over until he’s at a clean one and then he opens his bag and picks up his set of pencils. He wasn’t in the mood to draw, but he’s got to keep up the act or it would become painfully obvious that he’d just come to the gardens to see Hyunggu.

Wooseok often tells Yuto that it’s hard to read him, that he has the expression of a stone statue and Yuto sometimes agrees. He’s unintentionally caused people to distress about his reactions all too many times and he’s been told that he appeared to be unapproachable and frightening at first glance.

(Truth is, he’s really fucking soft on the inside).

So he starts sketching at first, undefined shapes and strokes that meant nothing. And then those undefined pencil marks became darker, more refined. He added meat to the bones, pulling and pushing the nib of his pencil against the paper until the distinct sound of scratching filled his ears. 

Just like that, Yuto lost the world around him.

This often happens when he draws, he loses himself to the strokes of his pencils, his gaze never leaving his sketchpad. There’s something emotionally transformative about drawing and the way it seemed to always draw out the louder parts of him. Just as Shinwon had said, everything Yuto couldn’t vocalise, he drew. His works became his secrets, the words he wanted people to know.

The parts of him that people didn’t see.

And he would have gone on like this forever- trapped in this little bubble, caught in the intensity of the moment, but he hears a very soft and very gentle, “Wow,” and he’s dragged from his shell and into reality.

Hyunggu’s leaning over his shoulder, his warm breath grazing Yuto’s ear and making all his hair stand. He’s so close, so unbearably close Yuto can smell him.

Hyunggu smells like petrichor, a strange scent to have but seeing how he’s always in this garden it’s not entirely unsurprising. It’s like how Wooseok said Yuto stunk up the dorm smelling like paint.

“That’s beautiful,” Hyunggu says and his voice is dipped in gold, his gaze intense. Yuto feels shy all of a sudden.

“Thanks,” comes his hesitant reply, his chest feeling warm and thick but in a good way. He starts to put the sketchbook down but Hyunggu stops him, reaching forward to hold it.

Yuto lets him.

He watches the way Hyunggu’s fingers glide ever so softly over the piece- a detailed sketch of the flowery field in front of them, with Neko sitting upright in the middle. It’s not a complicated piece and Yuto would consider this quite amateur in contrast with all his other works, but the way Hyunggu’s looking at it makes him feel quite proud.

“You’re very talented,” Hyunggu says, almost absently, “Can I look at the others?”

He doesn’t really wait for a reply and starts to flip to the other pages of the book, his gaze growing dark and deep and mesmerised. Yuto wants to tell him that he’s not the best, that there are others out there with better technique and skill and concept of colours and gradation. He wants to tell him that he hadn’t actually planned on taking up an arts degree because he didn’t think it would get him anywhere and he wanted to tell him that the look in his eyes is reassuring and he knows, for the first time, that he knows that he’s doing just  _exactly_ what the universe had planned for him.

But Hyunggu seems to know, he seems to understand. He knows, it’s in his eyes when he looks back up at him- two drops of trembling coffee, intense and dark and anguished. He knows.

He knows  _exactly_ what Yuto’s trying to say.

When their eyes meet, Yuto is falling again.  _Falling, falling, falling._

The wind picks up right then, and there’s a flutter of leaves and petals and Yuto can’t help the smile that cracks across his face when a yellow petal lands delicately on Hyunggu’s hair. Instinctively he reaches out to pluck it.

Hyunggu tenses and their eyes meet, ice against heat, coffee against coffee and Yuto’s breath is knocked right out of his lungs.

 _God,_ it should be criminal to look like he was birthed from the stars.

Hyunggu’s lips part, and he looks like he’s about to say something right then but the damned cat shrieks and he’s pulled out of his stupor, his eyes widening and darting between Yuto’s face and hand.

Hyunggu, startled, practically jumps away. There’s something in his gaze, a fright, a terror, a poltergeist. Yuto watches the despair fill his vision and the pain and the hurt and he realises that he must have done something to trigger this,  _damn him_ , Yuto’s only good at pushing people away and hurting others.

His hand’s still reaching out to Hyunggu and he curls his fingers carefully, drawing his arm back slowly. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t have come here.

It was a mistake. 

His heart is heavy, thumping like a stone in his chest. He’s hurt, and he wants to laugh- what kind of idiot is he? To get hurt by someone he’d just met?

His brain dissociates, going muddy and erratic and he hurriedly reaches for his tools, shoving them into his bag without saying a word.

Yuto’s hands are shaking.

“Yuto,” Hyunggu says and his voice is desperate and soft and tentative, “Yuto, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be,” comes his rushed reply, “I sh-shouldn’t have.”

“No, no, listen please.” 

Yuto stops, pulls his lips into his mouth and releases. He turns around to face Hyunggu and the other boy’s pale and glassy eyed and  _sad._

“I just... I didn’t mean to hurt you. I don’t like to be touched.”

 _Oh_.

It’s his expression, Yuto determines, like water and diamonds that he understands. He doesn’t ask further, doesn’t think he could. Instead he tries for a smile, pulling his lips across his face even though it feels tight and wrong.

And Hyunggu laughs, the sound filling Yuto’s ears and filling all the cracks in his soul and Yuto- _god_ , Yuto is falling and he doesn’t know how to stop.

\-----

Wooseok narrows his eyes at Yuto, then tilts his head then waves his hand in front of the other’s face.

He gets no reaction. At all.

Yuto is far away, in a place where Hyunggu resides and he’s perfectly okay with being there. Well, he is-. Wooseok and Changgu not so much.

“Oi Yuto,” Wooseok tries, his voice gravelly and deep and usually has enough power to break through whatever daydream a person was in, “Hey are you even listening to me?”

“I don’t think he is,” Changgu mumbles, pinning another clip on the hem of Yuto’s standard black t-shirt, “He’d be trying to whoop your ass if he were by now.”

“Hyung don’t you have homework to do?” Wooseok asks and Changgu sticks his tongue out at him childishly.

“Oi Adachi!” Wooseok resorts to finally, pulling along the ends of his name like a string, “ _Adachi! Adaboy!_ _”_

Now  _this_ has enough power to pull Yuto from his stupor. The image of Hyunggu’s grinning face quickly fades into Wooseok’s unhappy one and Yuto’s inclined to reach out and smack him but then he feels something against his shirt and turns around to see the handiwork Changgu’s been doing. The older boy’s lying down with one hand propping his head up while the other stuck clips on the hem of Yuto’s shirt.

“I hate the both of you.”

 _“Sure,”_ Changgu chuckles lazily, “What- or rather-  _who_ are you thinking about?”

Damn Yeo Changgu. Another thing about him that Yuto couldn’t stand was his ability to read people- even the most placid ones. There was just something annoyingly perceptive about him that Yuto could never hide from. One look and he could tell everything about a person.

Which also, perhaps, explained his _somewhat-accurate_ profiling with astrology.

Yeo Changgu is a very dangerous person and he should come with a warning sign attached to him.

“Yeah who?” Wooseok echoes, suddenly up in Yuto’s face. He can sense the teasing about to begin and wonders if it would be a wasted effort if he tried to run away from them. He doesn’t think he would be able to make it far because if the both of them couldn’t get information out of him then the rest of the gang would and Yuto nearly shudders from the thought of Hwitaek or Shinwon getting wind of this. It would spell disaster for him.

And eternal embarrassment.

“You guys must be really confident if you think I’m going to tell you,” Yuto says instead, keeping his features as schooled as possible- a calm lake, “And hyung don’t you have stuff to do?”

Changgu rolls his eyes, “Of  _course_ I do, but how could I leave my precious kids alone?”

Wooseok and Yuto both roll their eyes, “I’m calling Yan An hyung to come collect your ass.”

“If you do that I’m going to kick you so hard your anus will come from your mouth.”

Yuto snorts out a laugh while Wooseok gives Changgu the bird. 

“Talk shit get hit,” Yuto adds and Wooseok’s heated glare only makes him laugh all the more. Yuto thinks that Hyunggu would fit right in with his group of friends, much better than he had. 

Yuto had spent nearly an entire semester keeping to himself, not because he didn’t want to make friends, but because he was so undeservingly shy. He was afraid to talk to people, to get to know them and form bonds with them because he wasn’t sure  _how to_. Even with Wooseok, he’d spent the larger part of rooming together hiding away from him, ducking out early in the morning before Wooseok could wake up just so he didn’t have to face  _greeting_ or small talk with the giant.

Even when Wooseok tried to communicate, Yuto often found himself blabbering a response or desperately trying to say  _something, anything_ in order to keep the conversation going. It always fell flat, largely because of Yuto. Wooseok’s always been genuinely nice to him- a criminal psychology student with science in his brain, but willing to gather information about the arts just to get to know Yuto a little better.

The first time Wooseok had said anything related to Yuto’s field of expertise, the Japanese boy’s face had lit up like a Christmas tree, dark brooding eyes glistening with excitement. It had been the beginning of a sturdy friendship and marking the very first instance where Yuto had spoken like a speeding train. 

Wooseok had introduced him to all of his other friends- mostly seniors. Yuto had recognised Changgu as the guy who always had his face in a plant. And he recognised Shinwon as his direct senior because he’d seen one of his pieces during a lecture and had had his breath stolen from him. By himself, Yuto thinks he’d never make any friends. By himself he’d probably skulk in the shadows.

So as silence begins to settle in the room, remnants of laughter slowly dissipating into the air he finds it in himself to confess to his closest friends.

“His name is Kang Hyunggu.” Yuto whispers meekly and suddenly he can feel his friends tense. They exchange looks of surprise and with barely a blink, Wooseok and Changgu’s faces are nearly pressed up against his, their chocolate eyes wide with interest. They were going to pry all the information out of him, Yuto just knew, and he didn’t know (yet) if he wanted them to know about this. About him.

About the boy with the poltergeist in his arcane eyes.

Kang Hyunggu.

“Kang Hyunggu? Does he study here?” Changgu is the first to ask, his usually nosy character coming at full force. It’s written all over his face; the surprise, the pleasure, the brewing pot of unending teases that Yuto’s probably going to have to endure until he found the courage to introduce Hyunggu to his friends.

“N-no,” Yuto’s cheeks heat up scarlet, “He doesn’t.”

“Where did you meet?” Wooseok this time, his gaze mirroring Changgu’s. Yuto feels tight and constrained and pushes his friends away, only for the full force of self-consciousness to wash over him.

 _Oh god,_ he thinks as he buries his face in his palms,  _I’m so pathetic._

He’s never really had feelings for someone before- at least not this quickly. But there was something about Hyunggu that undid every knot and ribbon within him and  _god, god,_  he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

“Hey, hey,” Changgu says this time and Yuto feels his soft hand against his shoulder, this is maternal Changgu and Yuto carefully lifts his head up, “Yes that’s right, you don’t have to be embarrassed.”

“Yeah,” Wooseok echoes, settling down, “We’ve all known that you’re soft on the inside.”

Yuto glares at him.

“I fell in love with Yan An literally the moment I met him,” Changgu explains slowly, his lips curling in a ghost of a smile and Yuto can see the sadness lurking behind it, crouched and blue and waiting, “Not that I ever told him. So if you’re feeling embarrassed for catching feelings quickly you don’t have to be.”

Yuto pulls his lips into his mouth, releases. “I met him at The Gardens.”

Changgu blinks, “Wait. The one I asked you to go to?”

Yuto nods, pulling his lips into his mouth once again.

“What do you know about him?” 

Yuto thinks Hyunggu feels like home and warm honey and blankets on an icy winter night but he doesn’t say that. He doesn’t say that all he knows about Hyunggu is that there’s something inside of his gaze that’s tepid and frightened and filled with rage but his smile burned brighter than the sun and his eyes could knock the breath right out of Yuto’s lungs.

So he just says, “He has a cat named Neko and he’s always at the gardens.”

“He named his cat,  _Cat?_ _”_ Wooseok asks and it’s enough to draw a laugh right out of Yuto because Yuto remembers the way Hyunggu’s eyes had shifted away in embarrassment and how his lips had pulled so delicately into a whimsical smile. He was like stardust and magic and Yuto wanted to hold on to him very, very badly.

“You must like him a lot,” Changgu says, curling his fingers into a fist and bouncing it against Yuto’s shoulder, “You know what? I wish you the best, I’m rooting for your love Adachi.”

“Same here!” Wooseok laughs.

Yuto can only smile alongside his friends because, realistically, Kang Hyunggu didn’t seem like the type of person to fall with someone as fractured and uninteresting as he.

\----- 


	4. Chapter 4

Hyunggu feels like his entire body is a compressed spring; pressed down and tight and when Yuto appears he is released- jumping and exploding like thousands of fireworks in the sky. 

When Hyunggu looks at Yuto he thinks he can save the world, like he can save himself. That reality and death and destruction no longer has a place to stay in his heart. When Hyunggu looks at Yuto he is at ease. At peace. And he wants to curl his fingers around Yuto’s and feel the heat of his palm breathe fire through his but he knows that his hands feel like ice. 

He’s been iced for so long he doesn’t remember the last time he’d felt warm.

So when noon hits and he sees the familiar raven-head walking through the very same pathways he’s walked thousands of times over, he can’t quite keep the erratic beat of his heart from fluttering like a caged bird in his chest. Yuto comes in everyday with his painting supplies and they talk and draw and Hyunggu falls just a little bit more for him.

Neko jumps from his side, carefully prancing through the grass and then lithely landing beside Yuto. Hyunggu doesn’t know why (they’ve had this routine for days already) but he always hides behind a tree, gazing at the way Yuto grins widely at the cat and then kneels all the way to pat its head and scratch under its chin. There’s just something so endearing about it; how someone who looked as serious and tall and beautiful as Adachi Yuto could take time to play with an ungrateful feline.

(Most of the time Neko just walked away after getting his attention).

For the longest time, Hyunggu’s only friend had been his cat but now he’d formed an unlikely friendship with the fine arts major. Hyunggu’s never really vocalised it, but Yuto was very special to him.

He was the only person who was able to remove all the sadness from his heart, evaporating it like water into air- never to be seen again.

So when Yuto rises again and laughs and - _goddamn it-_ pushes his bangs away from his forehead, Hyunggu can’t help the little gasp in his throat. Yuto immediately stills and turns his head and Hyunggu’s already gone, running through the garden in the hopes that he’d never seen him and  _assumed_ him to be some kind of creepy stalker. He really isn’t, Hyunggu’s just a little  _too_ glad to see him again.

He’s an idiot.

And running away, which he shouldn’t be doing because Hyunggu’s pretty certain they’ve reached a level of friendship where he didn’t have to feel embarrassed every time they met. But he still did and Hyunggu wants to kick himself.

He tries for nonchalance, sitting on the slope they always went to and pretending to observe a fallen leaf. It’s nothing special and dead and he’s seen tons of these before- so who was he kidding anyway? If Yuto saw through this shitty facade, he doesn’t say anything. Instead he smiles and  _Jesus,_ Hyunggu doesn’t know what he’s done in his life to receive such a smile. 

The taller boy settles down gracefully beside him, and Hyunggu’s never really associated  _grace_ with anything but himself. He’d been a dancer before, cracking his knees and ankles and bruising the he’ll out of his body to condition it to become as fluid as water.

Yuto doesn’t have a dancer’s grace, he has the grace of an  _athlete,_ with strong arms and thighs and hands that held things as firmly as they did delicately. Which might have also answered why his gaze was both solid and liquid. He focused like a hunter whenever he drew and melted everything Hyunggu praised his work. 

Hyunggu loved to watch Yuto paint, there was just something so calming and serene about it. He feels like if he touched Yuto he’d melt away.

There was a softness to him like blended pastels.

So Hyunggu watched him paint, watched the way his brows creased and his lips pulled and how he submitted himself to art entirely. It reminded Hyunggu when he used to dance. The same focus, that same submission. It’s been many years now and he misses it terribly.

Life, life just tended to screw everything up for him.

“I, er,” Yuto says and Hyunggu can see his dusky caramel skin blush, “Brought something to share.”

Yuto’s shyness endeared the fuck out of Hyunggu.

“Something to share?” Hyunggu echoes, lifting his brows. Yuto did seem to have more bags than usual today, but Hyunggu’d just assumed that he’d brought a plethora of other tools to draw with. (In the past few weeks he’s seen Yuto go from pastels to paint to charcoal and he wonders if there’s  _anything_ Yuto can’t do).

Yuto, still bright red, quickly averts his eyes and zips open one of his black bags. Hyunggu watches the way his long, slender fingers latch on to the zipper and the way he so delicately pulls it to unzip the bag. Yuto has very gentle, very fascinating hands.

He almost wants to put his own in them, but he can’t. He can’t touch him. That’s rule number one; don’t touch people.

Everything would fall apart if he did, all the carefully crafted layers of his lies and secrets would come tumbling down and Hyunggu, Hyunggu’s heart still isn’t strong enough to lose Yuto. Not like that. Never like that.

It hurts, everyday it hurts that he can’t reach out and run his fingers through Yuto’s hair or cup his face or  _feel_ what his soft caramel skin felt like beneath his.

“It’s really small,” Yuto’s mumbling now, the way he usually does when he gets embarrassed and soft and Hyunggu feels his dead heart give a little tug. After some (somewhat adorable) fumbling, Yuto pulls out two little lunch boxes and holds them up in the palms of his hands. Hyunggu eyes the boxes and then brings his gaze up to Yuto’s and he  _doesn’t know what to say._

Hyunggu’s always been talkative, a terrible flaw at times, but he’s never been in an instance- at least not in several years- where someone’s been able to turn his tongue dry and evaporate every intellectual thought from his brain. He thinks he looks like a gaping fish, with wide eyes and hanging lips and his heart pounding dissonantly in his chest like an out of rhythm drumbeat.

“You’re,” he breathes because his voice isn’t strong enough to come out, “Offering me food?”

Yuto coughs, places the boxes down on his crossed knees and rubs at his nose- another nervous habit of his- “It’s nothing much really, I can’t cook so... apologies in advance if you get food poisoning.”

Hyunggu laughs at this, because it’s  _pretty impossible_ for him to get food poisoning. He’s still amazed that Yuto thought of offering him food.

Actually he’s pretty stunned speechless. No one’s been this kind to him in years and he feels the thick clog of tears in the base of his throat, rising and threatening to flood over. He swallows it down because he didn’t want to be crying in front of  _Adachi Yuto_ of all people.

“Is it... really okay? For me to eat it?” Hyunggu asks meekly, his gaze darting to the lunch boxes once again. He’s finding it hard grasping the fact that there was actual food.  _For him._  

Yuto looks at him funny, like he hadn’t been expecting Hyunggu to be this distraught over him offering food but his lips pull kindly and Hyunggu wants to curl himself around that smile forever and ever and stay there.

“Of course,” Yuto’s chuckling a bit now, “Here.”

It’s gimbap, rolled a little loosely and looking like it was clearly made by an amateur but Hyunggu appreciates it. He takes a pair of chopsticks from Yuto and holds them, tapping them together while thinking about which piece to try out first. 

He can feel Yuto’s intensely keen stare on the side of his face.

He picks up one of the smaller pieces (because it looked like it wasn’t going to fall apart if he did) and pops it into his mouth. He can taste the sesame oil and the crunch of carrots, cucumbers and spinach. The beef’s a little salty, but he doesn’t say anything about that while chewing.

“It’s really good,” Hyunggu says, picking up another and popping it into his mouth with a grin, “It reminds me of the ones I used to make with my mom.”

“Mhm?” Yuto asks, shoving some into his mouth. Hyunggu catches a little twitch of his eye- he must have realised the beef’s too salty.

“It’s been a long time, though,” Hyunggu’s voice dips, “But we’d make it almost every weekend. There’s something almost therapeutic about crafting the perfect gimbap, don’t you think?”

Yuto chokes while trying to answer and Hyunggu bursts out laughing, his voice coming from deep inside of him. Yuto looks so distraught it only fuels his laughter all the more.

“By the way,” Yuto coughs a little bit, his cheeks bright scarlet, “Are you working? You’re always wearing that.” he motions to Hyunggu’s outfit with his chopsticks.

_Oh no._

He looks down at his attire- a white shirt a little too big and loose on him paired with brown slacks and black shoes. It must be strange to Yuto to see him wear this exact attire everyday but... he can’t tell him the truth.

He’d leave, screaming and Hyunggu would lose him forever.

“Ah,” his voice quivers just like his hands and Yuto’s brows dip ever so lightly, “I work as a paperboy.”

“A paperboy? That’s still a job today?” 

If Hyunggu wasn’t so terrified of touching Yuto, he’d have hit him but instead he presses his fists against his hips and scowls, “Excuse me, paperboys all over the country are  _extremely_ insulted. I’d like you to know that I’m excellent at my job.”

“Okay,” Yuto chuckles, “I know you’re a mailman you don’t have to lie to me to make yourself look good.”

That bubble of laughter rises in Hyunggu’s throat once again, “I am  _not_ a mailman!”

And Yuto’s laughing and the sound is sweet and mellifluous. He laughs in intervals, little batches of laughter and hiccups and he  _always_ covers his mouth when he does this. Hyunggu wants to reach out and pull his arm away and tell him not to do that, that he’s extremely beautiful when he laughs and his features soften whenever he does and Hyunggu thinks, just thinks, that he’s falling for him.

Hyunggu doesn’t say any of these things, just chuckles alongside the Japanese boy and suddenly he doesn’t think the crushing weight of his lies and secrets hurt as much anymore, that their deathly grip around his throat is loosened every time Yuto came near.

\-----

Wooseok’s lying down on Yuto’s lap- again- this time his features pinched into a deep scowl. Yuto had returned from class to see his roommate pacing around the dorm restlessly, his feet smacking against the wooden floor loudly. He’d winced and settled his stuff down before trying to figure out what’s putting the giant in such a foul mood.

It was highly uncommon to see him unhappy.

At first Yuto had assumed that he was upset because he didn’t get a portion of Yuto’s gimbap but he’d learnt quickly that that wasn’t the reason. 

(“Upset? About your gimbap? Yuto, you do realise that your beef is always too salty right?”)

Yuto’s a little put off by that but at least Hyunggu had eaten all of it and hadn’t mentioned the salt overdose (even though your tongue has to be pretty damned damaged in order to not taste it).

He’d eventually settled down on their couch, grabbing one of his books on abstract art (something he’s challenging himself to know more about so he could recreate them) to read and a minute later Wooseok’s lying down with his ear pressed into Yuto’s thigh. Give him a few minutes and he would open up about his worries himself.

All Yuto had to do was wait.

“Yuto,” (ah there it is), “Can I ask you something?”

His eyes gloss over the pages of the illustrative book, going over paintings and sculptures and skimming over words that were mostly jargon. He’s pulling the silence just to grate on Wooseok’s nerves because that’s what best friends do.

And Wooseok’s squirming.

“Sure,” he finally answers, flipping a page, “What’s on your mind?”

“Changgu hyung.”

Yuto stills.

“I’m worried about him.”

Yuto wants to laugh it off, he wants to tell Wooseok that _this is Changgu we’re talking about, he’s tough as shit_ but he can’t find the words for it because truthfully, he’s seen how much he’s waned off. It had started subtly- smiling less, laughing a lot more. Then it had been staying up late and crashing his dorm more often and avoiding Yan An at every given chance.

Yuto’s seen how much Changgu’s hands are shaking, like there are motors lodged inside of them and his eyes look darker, sadder, greyer. In the months that he’s known the guy, Yuto couldn’t remember an instance where it seemed like the world was slipping from beneath his feet.

So instead of saying anything reassuring, he keeps quiet. He’s good at that, keeping silent.

When there is nothing to say he clamps his lips shut and Wooseok understands. He knows that Yuto’s trying to say, what Yuto’s trying to do because if he were to make a sound it would be a validation of their fears.

That Changgu’s not doing well, that they don’t know what he’ll do or how he’ll end up. The silence is noncommittal, a response that was neither here not there and as Yuto feels Wooseok relax slightly, he knows that it’s the right answer. 

“How was your date?” Wooseok asks instead, abandoning the earlier topic (even though it hung thickly between the both of them like an apparition) and Yuto coughs to dislodge the lump in his throat.

“It wasn’t a date.” it wasn’t, he’d made gimbap for himself and packed the excess for Hyunggu, none of this was planned. It wasn’t as if he’d woken up and realised that they’d never shared a meal together and it  _certainly_ wasn’t as if Yuto had mulled over not knowing what Hyunggu would like in his gimbap or if he was vegetarian and hated beef or if he liked carrots and cucumbers. And it  _certainly_ wasn’t the case that Yuto had woken up extra early to assemble everything and had spent a longer time trying to perfectly roll the rice and vegetables and meat in seaweed until they were decently tight and edible.

He scoffs, it _definitely_ wasn’t a date.

“Call it what you want, but you’re a dork and I’ve never seen you so shady before.”

“I’m not shady,” Yuto replies indignantly, but  _of course_ Wooseok had to be right. Not that he would ever affirm any of this, “He’s not in college.”

Wooseok lifts his head and Yuto has to look down to read his face. “Not in college? Didn’t you say he seemed to be around our age?”

Yuto rolls his eyes, pressing his forefinger against the middle of Wooseok’s forehead and forcing his head back down on his lap, “Not everyone _has_ to go to college, dumbass.”

 _And not everyone has the means to do so._  

There had been something in Hyunggu’s eyes when he’d been talking about his job, as though he was talking about something that was so far away- a distant memory he wished he could touch once again.

There was something old and rustic about Hyunggu, like he was a dated timepiece. Sometimes when he spoke Yuto thought he could be time itself, ancient and old and somehow very wise. But these were weird things to vocalise so he kept it to himself.

“You should introduce him to us,” Wooseok reaches out to rub at the spot Yuto had pressed, leaving a small red circle behind, “He seems pretty cool.”

“He is.”

“And you also like him.”

Yuto double takes.

“Don’t lie to yourself,” Wooseok says and Yuto can see his lips stretch all the way into his eyes, his gaze is soft and benign, “I know that look in your eyes. He’s got you wrapped around his little finger.”

Yuto almost hits Wooseok (damn him to know all these things, to read between all of Yuto’s words and pull out the things he didn’t  _want_ to be said) but as he lifts his arm to slam down against Wooseok’s shoulder, there’s an insistent bang on their door.

The two exchange quizzical glances, Yuto’s gaze darting to the clock that’s running ten minutes too slow on their wall. It’s past eleven already, who could possibly be knocking on their door at this hour?

A small, almost stupid part of Yuto immediately things  _Hyunggu_ but he’s sure it couldn’t be him. He wouldn’t know where Yuto was staying at and it wasn’t as if the university was easy to navigate around.

So it had to be one of the guys, though looking at the time was rather puzzling. The both of them knew that neither of their friends would go around knocking (or rather banging) on their doors past eleven. 

Wooseok gets to his feet with a huff and then scowls. The person on the other side is still banging, screaming for their names but the door is thick and they can’t quite make out the voice of the other person.

Yuto gets to his feet as well, strolling behind Wooseok as the taller boy reaches for the door knob. With one hand he pulls their lock away and then with the other he twists his wrist, the knob slowly unlocking.

It’s Yan An, cheeks blotched red and gaze watery and panicked. His breath is coming out in short bursts and his skin is unusually pale.

“Hyung,” Wooseok asks, his brows pulling intensely, “What’s wrong?”

“Changgu,” Yan An breathes and his voice is shaky and soft and weak and the tips of Yuto’s fingers go icy.

Fuck, it couldn’t be.

“Changgu’s missing and I can’t find him.”

“Did you try calling him?” Wooseok asks, keeping his tone levelled and his gaze strong. Yan An’s eyes shift from him to Yuto and Yuto can see the righteous fear drumming wildly behind his gaze.

Warning signs go off red and blue in his brain. Something is wrong. If Changgu was somewhere they knew of Yan An wouldn’t be here with he’ll on his heels and trepidation pumping through his system like a drug. 

“Wooseok,” Yuto starts to say but Yan An cuts him off, grabbing on to Wooseok’s upper arms desperately, his grip so tight his knuckles looked like they were going to pop right out of their sockets. His gaze is wild, almost like a frightened animal’s. 

“I’m scared,” he gasps, his entire body trembling, “I’m scared he’s hurt.”

“Hyung,” Wooseok grabs on to the older boy’s elbows to steady him, “It’s going to be fine.”

Yuto’s already rummaging through their closet, pulling out three coats and striding over to his friends. He hands Wooseok one and then forces Yan An into another, “Let’s go find him, he can’t be far.”

“But that’s the thing,” Yan An says, “He’s been so far away all this time, I don’t know where to look anymore.”

\-----

 


	5. Chapter 5

Yuto’s never seen Yan An so terrified. There was something almost unsettling about it, with the way his hands quaked and his breath hitched and how Wooseok had to grab on to his elbows to keep his body from doubling over. He was pale as moonlight and as emotional too.

It was hard looking at him like this.

“What happened?” Yuto asks, pulling his coat tightly over his chest. It’s freezing tonight and for some reason that’s terrifying Yan An all the more. He’s thinking- they’re all thinking- about where Changgu might be. Did he have a coat? Was he freezing?

Was he in pain?

There was this one time they’d been at a nearby skateboarding park. It had been a beautiful day when the temperature was just right and the sun was angled in just the perfect way where it was bright but not shining into their eyes. It had been one of the few times they’d all managed to find time to hang outside of campus and because Hyojong- another senior of theirs- lived nearby the park they’d all decided to go there and then return to his apartment later for drinks and movies.

Everything had been fine, with Yan An trying to teach Changgu how to skateboard at the side while Wooseok taught Yuto the best way to mix drinks while the rest did their own stuff when there was a sudden loud skid, a tumultuous scream followed by a thud.

Yan An started to scream and when they all turned their heads, Changgu was flat on his back and his skateboard was rolling away quickly. It had taken them a few seconds to realise that Changgu had fallen and they’d rushed over to him.

Changgu’s face- at that time- would always be burned into Yuto’s conscious. He wasn’t a strong-willed person and gore made his stomach toss three hundred and sixty degrees so seeing Changgu, white as sheet with lips as blue as the sea drenched in a pool of blood had made him nauseous. 

It was traumatic to see Changgu like that, even though he’d been fine. The paleness, blue lips, hard of breathing and speaking was because he’d landed so quickly his breath had been knocked out of him. The blood came from a cut on the underside of his head.

Looking for Changgu right then only reminded of Yuto of that day and it made him feel uneasy and anxious. What if something  _actually_ did happen to Changgu? What were they going to do?

The world was starting to fade in and out for Yuto, black spots dancing in front of his eyes.

 _Fuck,_ he thinks, _I’m such a lightweight._

“I don’t know,” Yan An says softly, “I don’t fucking know.”

Yuto knows, at least he thinks he does. Changgu must have seen Yan An do something, something that must have plucked painfully at his heartstrings and shot him with the realisation that Yan An probably could never be his.

He’s loved Yan An for so long he should be numb to the pain but for Changgu who feels the earth with his feet and loves so carelessly and freely like a paper airplane, it must have cut so deeply. 

“Hey Yuto?”

He doesn’t realise he’s doubled over, fingers tight on a railing until Wooseok’s arms are wrapped around his midriff and he’s hauling him up like he weighs as much as air, Wooseok’s eyes are concerned, his lips pulled down, “Shit, Adachi are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Yuto wheezes, “I just... remembered that day,” he pulls in his lips and lets go, “Changgu fell at the skate park.”

“God,” Wooseok sighs, “You scared the shit out of me.”

Yuto manages to steady himself on his feet, but the hand wrapped around his phone is shaking quite a bit. _Jesus,_   _what is up with me today?_

For some reason Yuto thinks about Hyunggu, and how pale he is. Looking at the moon only reminded him of this and Yuto- fuck- Yuto wants to kiss him very, very badly. But this wasn’t the time nor the place to be thinking about the boy with the poltergeist in his coffee eyes.

Right now he has to look for Changgu.

\-----

It’s harder to find Changgu than they thought. The three of them scour most of their campus- starting off with the usual spots Changgu usually would be at. The school gardens were empty, so was the cafeteria and the twenty-four hour campus library. Just for extra measure, they’d even gone back to Yan An’s dorm to check if Changgu had returned there.

He hadn’t.

They were getting tired, more than they let on but they couldn’t just let Changgu stay missing. With every minute that passed, Yuto grew more anxious. 

Those black flashes weren’t going away and Wooseok notices this, so he grabs on to Yuto’s upper arm to steady him. There’s something arcane in his gaze that Yuto couldn’t explicitly read.

In Yuto’s head all he kept seeing was Changgu covered in blood and his face would morph and suddenly he was seeing Hyunggu covered in blood, his lips pale and his eyes wet and scarlet.

He mutters, _“Please.”_

“Yuto,” Wooseok calls out to him and Yuto is a million miles away, “Shit, Yuto!”

“Is he okay?” Yan An now, his voice as shaky as Yuto’s legs. He comes in front of him, reaches out and grabs his wrist. Yuto feels Yan An press the tips of his fore and middle finger into his skin and then pauses, “His heart’s beating too quickly.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” Wooseok says exasperatedly, “This isn’t usual-”

“I’m okay,” Yuto breaks in, steadying himself once again to no avail. His head spins and Wooseok grabs on to his shoulder, “I’m just not feeling good.”

But he keeps seeing Hyunggu, all bloodied and bruised, torn from the inside in with eyes as wet as water and as deep and sorrowful as midnight. He wants to reach out, to pull him and hold him and cry into his shoulder.

But Hyunggu’s always dying, fuck, he’s always dying and Yuto can’t do anything to save him.

“Yuto, _Jesus,”_ Wooseok stops and he feels like he’s in another world, like his mind is elsewhere but his body is present. He’s not entirely conscious as Wooseok holds him steady and in one swift motion, has him on his back and his arms looped loosely around his neck. Wooseok hops to adjust Yuto, his hands carefully hooking under his knees to keep him stable. Yuto closes his eyes and Hyunggu is still dying.

“Yuto doesn’t look good,” Yan An says, “We should bring him back-”

“No hyung,” Yuto rasps, squeezing his eyes shut, “Let’s go find him.”

So they do, Wooseok holding on to Yuto firmly while Yan An searched desperately. They were going to find him, Yeo Changgu. He wasn’t the type of person to disappear off the face of the earth without saying goodbye.

He had too much love in his heart and sun in his eyes to do that.

And they do, Changgu’s pissed drunk and seated by the pond in campus. He hadn’t been there earlier and something told them that he’d just returned from drinking himself senseless.

Yuto can’t breathe seeing Changgu like this, he can’t breathe because he keeps getting flashes of Hyunggu dead in the snow. 

So he closes his eyes and buries his head in Wooseok’s neck and the younger boy’s calling out to him softly, asking him how he felt and why he was so cold and  _Yuto could you at least make some noise so I know you’re not dead?_

Yuto grunts a weak reply. All the anxiety that had built up within him comes crashing down and Yuto feels both weary and relieved.

“Changgu!” Yan An screams and it’s loud and clear like a church bell on a windy day and Yuto sobers up a little, his eyes following the way Yan An sprints across the field over to Changgu, tackling the smaller guy to the ground.

And he’s crying, they’re both crying and Yuto doesn’t know if it’s the alcohol in Changgu’s system or if he’s sober enough to know that Yan An’s spent hours looking for his sorry ass but Changgu grabs on to Yan An for dear life and Yuto can see all the sad love in his eyes, pulling him to Yan An with all the force of the earth itself. 

Wooseok sighs and Yuto knows that everything is going to be alright.

“They have issues to work out,” Wooseok says, adjusting Yuto so that he’s more comfortable, “And Adachi I think you do too.”

Yuto grunts because he’s to tired to respond in coherent, intellectual sentences. 

In the distance they watch as Yan An drags Changgu’s mouth to his and Wooseok goes, “Yep that’s all for today folks,” before steering around. 

Yuto can’t help but smile and he knows that Wooseok is doing the same too.

Guess Changgu’s love worked out for him after all.

\-----

For the first time, Yuto doesn’t know what to do for an art piece. 

He stares blankly at his canvas, his charcoal stained fingers lifting up a piece- ready to start with something,  _anything_ but nothing coming to mind. Well, there was one thing, but Yuto doesn’t think he could just draw him.

Even though he knew Hyunggu’s features like the back of his hand- he knew  _exactly_ how arched his brows were, how intense his eyes were, how slanted his nose was, how rich his lips were. He knew just how sharp his jaw was, he knew just how round his cheeks were.

And Yuto knows just  _exactly_ how beautifully composed Hyunggu was, like he was created out of clay by the gods themselves. He was perfect in every way and soft like blended out pastels. Yuto wanted to immortalise him desperately.

“Art block?”

Yuto nearly jumps out of his skin, instead a surprised sort of animal noise leaves his lips and he turns around to find Shinwon standing behind him, an amused look ingrained into his features.

Shinwon’s always been a handsome fellow, but sometimes Yuto thought that he saw more than he let on and it always kept him on guard. Perhaps, that could be a possible reason for his artistic talent.

(Even though he often told Yuto that he possessed an unusual skill of drawing out a person’s inner demons through his pieces). 

“Don’t worry,” Shinwon slithers from Yuto’s side to stand behind Yuto’s empty canvas, “It usually goes away at some point.”

“At some point?” Yuto repeats, feeling a tad bit annoyed. He’s not going through a block, he knows  _exactly_ what he wanted to create but he needed the person in front of him, beside him.

With him.

Yuto thinks that he’s pretty fucked for aching for Hyunggu so much. He wants to kiss him very, very, very badly.

“I heard you’ve got yourself a boyfriend.” 

Yuto chokes.

_What?_

“I’m throwing a party tonight,” Shinwon’s grinning because he knows just  _exactly_ how to trap Yuto, “It’s in celebration of Changgu finally not being an idiot and finally confessing to Yan An. You’re coming and bringing your boy as well.”

Yuto wants to protest: starting off with  _he’s not my_ _boyfriend_ followed by  _I don’t like parties_ but he barely has the time to do so because Shinwon’s walking off and as though sensing Yuto’s apprehension, lifts up two fingers and taps his head twice before waving it.

The cocky bastard, Yuto grimaces, he knows just  _exactly how_ to get Yuto to attend one of his parties.

The shitty part? Shinwon’s parties were always fucking fantastic.

\-----

Yuto wants to kiss Hyunggu, and as much as he wants to suppress this desire it’s nearly  _impossible_ when Hyunggu’s pouting his lips like  _that_ \- all soft and round and pink like peaches.

Pouting should be illegal, at least for Yuto’s heart because he’s quite sure it’s ready to burst right out of his chest.

Hyunggu doesn’t notice these things, which is good for Yuto because he certainly doesn’t want to have to deal with  _dealing with his feelings._ (Which are all over the place and not where they should be).

Yuto thinks he’s quite an organised person. While Wooseok chucked his books all over the place without organisation, Yuto liked to keep everything in alphabetical order. His parts of their room was usually neat, with everything allocated in their proper places. So yes, Yuto thinks he’s quite an organised person but somehow with Hyunggu he’s all over the place.

“I work across the garden,” Hyunggu’s voice is sonorous and warm like honey, “There’s a small printing shop there that does deliveries.”

“Somehow I can imagine you on a bike, screaming down the street,” Yuto replies, he turns his head and looks at Hyunggu’s rounded cheeks, a stark contrast to his cut jaw, “You’re probably that person.”

Hyunggu rolls his eyes while his lips curve, he adjusts himself so that his body’s turned to face Yuto, one arm bent and his hand holding his head up.

They’re lying down on the grass while Neko went searching through it. It’s comfortable this way, as though there was nothing in the world that could tear them apart like this, like there was nothing weighing them down or going to hurt them. Like this, Yuto can almost feel Hyunggu  on his skin, can smell the earth after rain.

He can laugh with all of his heart.

“I don’t scream!” Hyunggu protests, “And just so you know, I’m a  _very_ efficient person. I’m, like, the employee of the month _every month.”_

“Uh-huh.” Yuto teases and Hyunggu swats at him, always swatting, but never touching. He’s wanted to ask him why he was so afraid of touching people and why he was so afraid to be touched. Why was Neko an exception? It couldn’t be a fear of germs, Yuto’s perceptive enough to know that but he could never bring himself to ask Hyunggu about it.

He knows, however, that Hyunggu can probably sense this unsaid question. 

“I used to work at a seven-eleven,” Yuto says, shuddering. He’d always get the night shift because his manager said that during the day he looked scary but at night he looked terrifying. It would “Keep thieves away.”

Funnily enough, no one attempted to steal whenever he was on shift.

Yuto doesn’t actually like being thought of as unfriendly, but he can’t do anything to change his face.

“Yikes,” Hyunggu says, though his tone seemed a little lost, “Must have been tough.”

“It could have been worse,” Yuto’s chuckling now, “Someone could have held me up at gun point.”

“You? Gunpoint?” Hyunggu’s laughing so hard he begins to cough and Yuto immediately reaches out to pat him but stops midway, curling his fingers into a fist and then pulling his arm back.

When Hyunggu laughed like this he didn’t look so pale. There was warmth to him, somehow, even though his skin still looked a little pasty and as if the moon was shining from within him. He looks healthy like this. Yuto never mentions this as well.

Because Hyunggu’s taking his breath away. Again.

Eventually Hyunggu calms down and his eyes are glittering and soft and if Yuto looked close enough, he thinks he won’t see the sadness lurking deep in his gaze. He wonders why Hyunggu looked so sad all the time.

“Can I take your picture?” Yuto blurts out, suddenly growing  _very insecure_. There’s silence for a while before he hears Hyunggu shift, pushing himself into a sitting position himself. It’s thick and heavy, like black smoke, and Yuto wants to run away.

 _Fly, Yuto,_ Wooseok had told him,  _Stop running away when you know you’re so much better than that._

This is him trying to be better, this is him trying to take that great leap. To fly. To soar.

“I, er,” his heart is bouncing in his chest and he wants to reach into his chest and squeeze it to tame it, “I want to draw you.”

“Draw me?” Hyunggu’s voice is quiet, nervous. That damned poltergeist is back in his eyes and Yuto wants to reach it and pull it out. He doesn’t know what he can do to stop it, “I’m nothing special.”

“You are,” Yuto immediately rushes in, pushing himself into a sitting position, his cheeks burning and his heart pounding but he needs to say what he needs to say, “You’re... fuck. Hyunggu have you seen yourself? You’re... you’re worth immortalising.”

“Immortalising,” Hyunggu laughs ruefully, “Funny. Sometimes, Yuto,” he sighs out, “do you know that I’m dead?”

Yuto’s brows furrow, “Don’t say that.”

“It’s true,” Hyunggu is very serious now, “I died a long time ago... but... I’m better. I’m better now. I like to believe I’m not as haunted as I once was; that maybe I only hear the ghosts now.”

Yuto pulls his lips into his mouth, bites down, lets go.

“But I also... I also want to live. I don’t know if taking my photograph is a good idea, but I guess we should try.” 

And when he looks at Yuto, the world around him disintegrates into nothing. Hyunggu’s eyes are angry, arcane, on absolute fire. There’s a storm burning behind his eyes, an acceptance, a fury that Yuto doesn’t full understand.

_I also want to live._

So Yuto pulls out his phone and he snaps a picture of Hyunggu like this, with acrimony in his coffee gaze and sorrow lurking around his eyes and an inferno burning so brightly in his soul.

“Shinwon, a senior of mine... he’s throwing a party tomorrow night.”

Hyunggu’s brows lift. Yuto stops speaking because Neko crawls into his lap, rubbing her body against his and then twisting around so that her back was in the dip between Yuto’s crossed legs. He strokes her belly just to avoid Hyunggu’s gaze.

_I died a long time ago._

“Is this an invite, Adachi Yuto?”

His name sounds good coming from Hyunggu’s mouth. He pulled and pushed and curved and dipped over all the syllables in his name. He almost wants to keep hearing Hyunggu say his name until he’s old and grey and sick of existing.

“Yes,” he keeps his eyes on the cat because he doesn’t think he can handle looking into the other boy’s eyes. He hears Hyunggu’s soft tinkle of a laugh, almost sad, almost happy.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Yuto lights up at this, at the possibility of time spent with him outside of this garden.

And he grins, he can’t help it and Hyunggu laughs and Yuto thinks that  _finally_ the universe is on his side.

\-----

 


	6. Chapter 6

It puts their minds at ease knowing that Changgu’s not longer in that depressive, self-pitying and miserable slump he’d been in for months. Looking at him dull and grey made everyone worry because he always tried to appear like the colour yellow but it was a front, a facade.

Yuto’s glad his friend’s out of that and he’s pretty sure Wooseok is too. There’s not going to be any dorm crashing at three in the fucking morning for some time unless- and Yuto touches wood for this- the disgustingly cheesy couple got into a fight.

Wooseok’s already told Yuto that he doesn’t want to deal with that, so all responsibility at pacifying Changgu had befallen Yuto (even though he hadn’t wanted anything to do with that. Wooseok had asked him while he’d been half asleep, taking full advantage of his still unfocused brain). (Damn him).

It’s also endearing to know that Yan An’s been an entire 6 foot tall dork this entire time because he hadn’t had the courage to fess up about his feelings for Changgu. It was nice to see him finally free from the asinine grasp of this secret.

But that opened up new problems and mainly for both the younger boys.

Yan An and Changgu were  _that_ couple. The disgusting one. The one that held hands and kicked under tables and wore matching  _I belong to him_ shirts and finished each other’s sentences.

And Yuto thinks he’s going to hurl if he has to see Yan An turn and giggle at Changgu one more time.

“If I’d known they were going to be this gross,” Wooseok whispers from the back seat of Changgu’s car, already uncomfortable because the damned thing was too small and Wooseok’s knees were almost pressed into his chest, “I’d have taken a cab.”

“I’d have willingly shared the fare with you,” Yuto grimaces because Yan An walks his fingers like legs over to Changgu and then pokes him in the cheek and Changgu giggles back, swatting at Yan An, “Ok screw that. I’d rather have Hwi hyung pick us up.”

And that said  _a lot_ because Hwi had the penchant to start speaking and  _never stop_. It was like he was born with a motor in his mouth.

Plus he cried when sad songs came on the radio, but that wasn’t an issue. The issue was that when he cried he made the ugliest sound in the entire universe. (Wooseok almost knocked Hwi out once because he couldn’t stop crying to  _Bleeding Love_ and the entire ride had consisted of the older boy going _“eeeeeeee.”_  until Wooseok couldn’t take it anymore and pledged murder).

Yuto had plugged his earphones so deeply into his ears he half thought he’d need to go to the ER to extract them.

That aside, Yan An and Changgu were back to being normal and there was a ban imposed on Changgu drinking by himself.

He’d been hopelessly drunk when they’d found him, according to Wooseok. He’d looked like a ghost and acted like one too, slurring words and apologising over and over again. Only Yan An had been able to shut him up and drag him back to his dorm.

Wooseok had had to deal with Yuto who’d been drifting in and out of consciousness. This has never happened to him before and Yuto wonders why his body had betrayed him the way it did. He knows he’s weak to the sight of gore and blood but that didn’t warrant a mild panic attack at all.

Yuto doesn’t tell anyone that whenever he slept, he saw Hyunggu covered in rich scarlet pooling around him like angel wings. He’s always left in snow, his eyes wide and unseeing and his lips curled into a call for help. Frozen forever.

For no one to find.

He doesn’t realise that he’s wringing his fingers together until Wooseok points it out and then everyone’s attention is on him.

_Fuck._

“Changgu I’m pretty sure your eyes need to be on the road,” he grumbles, crossing his arms over his chest to appear intimidating (but mostly to stop anxiously twisting his hands together), “Unless you want to die.”

“I’m pretty sure,” Changgu responds with a wry twist of his lips, “That my driving wouldn’t be the cause of our deaths tonight.”

Yuto rolls his eyes.

“Did you  _actually_ invite your boyfriend?” Wooseok asks and Yuto might as well have jumped right out of the car. He unravels like a ribbon, quickly turning and smacking Wooseok in the arm while the taller boy broke out in a loud, echoey laugh.

“Wait, Yuto has a boyfriend?” Yan An now, confused and very clearly lost. He looks at Changgu and then back at Wooseok. Yuto’s now changed positions so that his hands are covering his face.

“He sure does,” Wooseok chirps and if Yuto wasn’t trying to metaphorically dig himself a grave, he’d have smacked him once again, “Some guy named-”

“Would you shut up?” Yuto mumbles pathetically into his palms. Once the idiots began teasing, it never stopped. If he had to intervene, someone was going to end up in the ER with broken bones.

“What’s his name?” Yan An enquires and from the lilt of his voice, Yuto can tell that the Chinese boy’s overly enthusiastic about this.

“Okay boys,” Changgu’s voice penetrates the buzzing air, his tone dipped and serious, “Let’s not put Yuto on the spot. You know he doesn’t like that.”

“Thanks,” Yuto grinds out, peeking between the crevices of his fingers, “You’re a real gem.”

Changgu rolls his eyes, Yuto catches it in the rearview mirror.

“Hyunggu,” Yuto whispers, the name coming to him as naturally as breathing air. He’s spent ours repeating it in his head, memorising every dip and curve of it.  _Hyunggu, Hyunggu, Hyunggu._ Hyunggu with glistening eyes that weren’t brown or blue or green. But black. Black like the night sky, black like ashes after a fire.

Eyes that twinkled and glistened and shone. Eyes that were home.

Eyes that carried a sorrowful poltergeist within them. Eyes that raged and soared and caught the beats of Yuto’s heart in a jar.

Yuto wants to kiss him very, very, very badly. 

Under the rain. In a hailstorm. With the sun scorching against the top of his dead.

He wanted to kiss him even if his heart was dead. Even if he was broken like a glass.

The car grows very quiet, only the sound of breathing filling the charged silence. There must have been something in his name- a quiet plea to stop teasing, an invitation to ask more. 

A yearning.

Yan An is the first to speak and Yuto closes his eyes when he does.

“You must like him very much.”

 _Not like,_ Yuto thinks,  _I think I’m in love with everything about him._

\-----

“You’ve been staring at the front door for hours!” Yan An yells over the roar of music, pushing himself between bodies and coming to stand beside Yuto. His skin’s glistening, his gaze like stars have landed in them.

Yuto catches the swell of his lips and the mess of his hair. He knows that Yan An’s been up to shortly before approaching him.

He doesn’t mention this, solely to spare the taller guy from embarrassment.

“I haven’t!” Yuto tries, but he’s never been a loud person anyway so Yan An has to dip his head, nearly pressing his ear to Yuto’s mouth, “I said,  _I_ _haven’t!”_

“Oh!” Yan An says, laughing a little, “He must be very special if you’ve been waiting for him.”

Yuto wants to object but he knows he isn’t fooling anyone. He’s spent the better part of the night with his gaze fastened like a lock on Shinwon’s front door. There’s a part of him that whispers about how Hyunggu was going to turn up, that he wouldn’t just turn down an invitation without telling Yuto beforehand.

 _It’s not like you have his phone number,_ the more rational part of Yuto insists and he curses at himself. He hadn’t actually thought that he’d  _need_ Hyunggu’s number because he saw him everyday at the gardens without fail. There was no reason to assume that he wouldn’t be there. Now Yuto feels like a moron.

“Is he not coming?” Yan An asks finally, the million dollar question. The truth that Yuto didn’t think he wanted to consider, the reality that he knew wasn’t just a figment of his imagination.

Kang Hyunggu wasn’t going to turn up for this party and Yuto wonders why this disappoints him more than it should have. Hyunggu wasn’t obligated to come, he had no reason to do so either. Other than Yuto, he’d know no one else here.

But he’d wanted to introduce him to all of his friends. He’d wanted to see the light in Hyunggu’s eyes, the wide curve of his lips until they reached his eyes.

He’d have fit right in, even through the teasing and the bad jokes and the constant prodding for information. Yuto’s friends would have made him feel like he was at home. They were warm that way and sometimes Yuto forgets that they weren’t his actual brothers.

So he’s disappointed and sad and he’s knocking back his cup of alcohol, feeling it cut down his throat like a knife. 

Yan An gives him an odd look, “You should,” his voice gets drowned out by a group of people laughing loudly in a corner, “Slow down.”

Yuto shakes his head, “I hold my alcohol well.”

Yan An’s brows crease, “Yuto, you can barely-” the group blows out in laughter again and Yuto takes this as his time to leave, he knows  _exactly_ what Yan An’s trying to tell him. But he feels the burn of sadness in his chest like someone’s stabbed him there and he doesn’t know how to breathe. 

He feels stupid. He feels lonely.

He misses Hyunggu and there’s a panicked part of him that keeps thinking about him in the snow, with glassy eyes and blue lips.

There’s too much noise, breaking into Yuto’s brain and making him feel uneasy. He’s not nearly as drunk as he wants to be and a quick turn of his head tells him that he’s probably going to be the only sober person left.

Yuto doesn’t like getting drunk anyway. 

The bodies mashed together and the deep heartbeat of the music  _is_ making him feel suffocated. He takes a breath and pushes his way through the crowd. His target: the kitchen.

It’s the only place in all of Shinwon’s home that wasn’t crawling with drunk college kids.

_Hyunggu, Hyunggu, Hyunggu._

“Whoa there,” Shinwon appears just as Yuto’s swallowing his second cup of the night, his lids half drooping and his lips curving lazily across his face. He slinks toward Yuto, his gait slow and careful. His hands on the kitchen drop to his sides like water.

The hair on Yuto’s arms rise.

Those same warning alarms go off in his head. There isn’t anything terrifying about Shinwon sober but there was everything terrifying about Shinwon when he was drunk. He had this way about him when he wasn’t thinking straight- all the niceness in him peeled away to reveal a skeleton of brutal honesty. Yuto’s seen Shinwon’s words carve so deeply into someone he doesn’t think the person’s fully recovered until today.

But above all that, Shinwon was a great senior and friend.

“It’s Adaboy,” he grins, all teeth and eyes and lurches forward, grabbing on to Yuto’s wrists and bringing them up, “Your heart’s trembling. Are you in pain?”

Yuto pulls his lips into his mouth, bites down hard.

“I don’t see your plus one,” he looks around, frowning. Yuto wonders what Shinwon can actually see over the darkness and mass of bodies. Ocularly, it looked like his house was filled with a large obsidian monster, “Did he not come?”

Yuto’s going to start counting how many times he gets asked this question. As of now:  _two_.

Shinwon doesn’t wait for an answer (and Yuto’s starting to guess that all of his questions are rhetorical), “I guess not. Sweetheart, you look pale.”

Yuto’s never been called pale before, golden (by Hyunggu) yes, but never pale. He doesn’t think he’s anywhere near pale, has never been. He’s almost insulted.

And  _ah,_ the alcohol’s turning his thoughts rather caustic.

“Your hands are shaking,” Shinwon comments, his brows pulling together, “Adachi?”

“I’m  _fine,_ hyung,” Yuto bites out, trying to snatch his hands away but Shinwon’s grip is firm- just like the way he held on to his brushes. There was a delicacy to it, almost as if he were holding on to something important and rare, something extraordinary.

Yuto can’t stop looking at Shinwon’s grip on his wrists, firm and soft at the same time. There was something else to this, beneath the drunkenness and wavering glances. There was something Shinwon was trying to tell him that he couldn’t process.

“If you miss someone, you should let them know,” he mutters loosely, his hands going from Yuto’s thin wrists down to his palms. Shinwon presses his thumbs into the center of the Japanese boy’s hands firmly, his eyes narrowing as though he was trying to decipher something, “Your life line is very short.”

“Hyung,” Yuto tries but Shinwon isn’t listening to him, not exactly. 

“Yuto, you have very important hands. Talented hands. If there’s a fire you must protect them at all cost.”

“What,” Yuto’s brows knit together- Jesus he must be pissed drunk- “are you even saying?”

Shinwon laughs, rubbing his thumbs against Yuto’s calloused skin, rough from years of modelling clay and sports and trying to create a better life for himself. Changgu sometimes say that this roughness lies in his gaze like a waiting snake, ready to strike. 

“I’m saying,” Shinwon laughs this time, letting Yuto’s hands drop suddenly, “That you might die tomorrow and you’d never have let your boy know that you love him! And he could  _die_ tomorrow and you’d live forever with guilt. Because you’re dumb as shit, Adachi.”

_He could die tomorrow._

Blood.

There’s so much of blood.

“Shinwonie hyung!” Wooseok bursts into the kitchen at that very moment, throwing his arms around the smaller guy and practically crushing him to death in his typical way of greeting. Shinwon’s having none of it though, struggling through the cage created by Wooseok’s massive arms.

“Let go of me you giant fuck!” Shinwon’s screaming and Wooseok’s laughing like there is nothing pulling him down by his ankles into a sea of scarlet.

Not like Yuto.

It’s cold, it’s suddenly so cold. He can feel it right down into his bones, freezing the cartilage over. It’s the pain that hits him next, like a blast of shrapnel against his scalp. The world fades, dizzies out. 

He doesn’t know who he is, doesn’t know where he is. It’s just cold, icy.

Yuto’s wheezing as the blood, warm and thick spills down the collar of his shirt, down over the line of his shoulders and into the tips of his fingers. It thickens and collects inside the creases of his skin, marking him forever in vivid scarlet.

His knees give out next and he’s falling,  _falling, falling_ into nothingness, into everything. It’s so bright, it’s so cold. It’s so warm.

Angel wings. He’s an angel bathed in crimson, with powerful wings that stretched and pooled behind his back- going on forever.

It’s cold, it’s warm. It’s bright, it’s dark.

He can’t breathe, his chest rising and falling like someone’s pushing and pulling it quickly. His throat is dry, his tongue is tired. He’s screaming in his head  _help me, help me please._

Darkness dances before his eyes, little dots of inkiness spreading themselves like a blanket.

“Yuto? Yuto!” he hears distantly, like a faint whisper. At first he thinks it’s his own thoughts, but then he realises it’s not.

It’s Hyunggu, screaming.

“Yuto!” Wooseok charges forward, grabbing him right before his legs give out. He’s pale as death, his eyes opened but unfocused.

The last thing Yuto thinks of before he blacks out is that he really shouldn’t have taken that second drink.

\-----

Hyunggu looks at the moonlight, watches the way it washes over the display of flowers. In the day time it’s a sea of yellows and reds and oranges. At night, when the sky’s given way to indigo and speckled with gold dust, the colours are greyed out and empty. If anyone asked why no one visited the gardens at night, Hyunggu would say that it was because there was nothing to see other than sorrow.

He looks at the flowers, where he’d been. Where he will be.

Hyunggu wonders how Yuto would recreate this, what kinds of rough or soft strokes he would use on his canvas to immortalise these flowers. In the day time, in the night time.

He should have told Yuto the truth. He should have said no, that he couldn’t go to this party. He should have told him that he would trade anything in the universe to spend just one night away from this garden with him, that he would do anything just to hold his hand and feel his skin beneath his.

Hyunggu should have said many things, but he hasn’t stopped hurting in years. It’s settled like an incurable disease in his chest and with every breath he is reminded by just how powerful this hurt is. He clings on to grief like a child he is still teaching how to walk and he sometimes catches himself speaking in condolences and obituaries. Hyunggu has been dead for so many years he doesn’t know what to do to feel alive again.

It had been Neko at first, teaching him how to exist and survive. Then it had been Yuto, teaching him how to love and  _live._ He’s been dead so many years but now he’s learning- like that child learning to walk- he’s learning how to set himself free.

He picks up a stone, feels its rough weight and cut in his palm.

He’s angry. At himself. At fate, at the universe. 

At everything.

If he’d just... if he’d just avoided  _one thing_ , his life (or lack thereof) wouldn’t have turned out this way. He’d fallen so quick, so fast he’d given himself whiplash. There had been no consequences back then, just pure electricity in his veins.

Hyunggu throws the stone with all the force of the earth, watches it crash into the flowers and kick up dirt.

And he appears, The Gardener.

Fresh fear finds its way into Hyunggu and he hides, ducking behind a tree. And for a moment he  _forgets._

There’s no way The Gardener can see him. Not with his age or his eyesight or in the dark or logically. Hyunggu’s not been seen for a long time, always hiding, always quietly breathing.

Yuto’s been the only one to  _truly_ look at him. 

Neko’s fur is on its ends, rising to the sky as her eyes lock on The Gardener. The old man curses at the cat and then disappears, flashing his light at other plants while surveying the gardens for the night. 

Hyunggu emerges from the shadows, pale as moonlight, pale as death. He hates him.

The Gardener. He hates him with every fibre of his being.

And tonight he is filled with a lot of regret. 

He casts one last look at the flowers, at the secrets it held and the secrets it threatened to reveal. The secrets of his heart.

Hyunggu smiles sadly, lifts his palm and stares at it. He wonders what Yuto’s hand felt like.

And he wishes he weren’t so terrified of holding it.

\-----


	7. Chapter 7

Hyunggu misses Yuto like the sea misses the shore every time it has to kiss it and pull back. At first it had been a dull ache in his chest and then it had progressed ever so slowly- akin to poison- to every part of his body. 

He missed the chatoyant slant of Yuto’s eyes and the little mole that sat on his right eyelid. And he missed the off-center slant of his nose and his cheekbones and his obsidian hair. He missed the way he smelled like paint and always wore black even though Hyunggu knew it was scorching during the day.

But most of all, he missed the way Yuto filled him with a sense of purpose and belonging.

It’s been two weeks and he’d gone from waiting at their usual spot to standing by the gates. 

Everyday was the same; a no show.

Anxiety had presented itself slowly in Hyunggu’s veins, starting like a soft hum of breath in his ears before turning nastier- an angry scream of awareness.

Something is wrong. Something has happened to Yuto. 

He is hurt. He is sad.

He is... 

Hyunggu is forgotten. As it happened. As it always happened. He was just a passing breeze in Yuto’s life, a story for another day. The boy he’d befriended at _THE ORIENTAL GARDENS_ , the boy with the sad eyes and shaking wrists and overly self-righteous cat. 

Hyunggu sinks into grass, cradling his head in his hands. He feels Neko come up to him and bump her nose against his thigh. 

It comes like a wave, waiting silently and then crashing with all the rage in the world. Two drops then three and Hyunggu can’t breathe through the tears. 

He aches, everything aches. It’s the same story again, the same tale of a boy falling in love. The same tale of loss and hurt.

He clings on to it with both of his hands because it’s all he knows. It’s all he’s ever known. He puts them into his body like pennies into a jar, collecting up until there’s no space for more.

And then he’ll explode and everything will overflow and he will struggle to put the pieces back together again. Hyunggu shuts his eyes and he sees Yuto’s staring back at him- the very eyes he looked for in all the faces of the people he walked by every day.

But what can he do, what can he ever do? He is tied to this god awful place like a contract. 

What can he do when he’s lost the only thing that’s ever let him feel  _human?_

_\-----_

The dreams don’t stop. When Yuto drifts to sleep, there’s the smell of blood in his nose and the thud of a blunt object in his ears.

He feels wetness beneath his head. And then it’s not him- it’s Hyunggu. 

Bloodied, broken, blue.

Always choking,  _“Please.”_

He wakes up with his shaking hands over his ears and his clothes soaked through. He’s got a whole bunch of pills from the hospital, from medication for headaches to sleeping pills. He’s a mess, even Wooseok says so, but no matter how many times he mulls over it, he doesn’t think he can exactly place what’s wrong with him.

This...  _trauma_ (according to Yan An) had crept up on him slowly like a ghost. He hadn’t seen it coming, but he of all people, didn’t think anything could have traumatised him to the point of nightmares.

Yan An thinks it’s because he’s afraid of losing Hyunggu. Yuto thinks that he’s holding on to Hyunggu with two tightly clenched fists because he’s afraid that if he blinked or let go, Hyunggu would disappear forever. It was in his eyes, the flight.

Yuto wants to tell him to stay. With him. Beside him.

Forever. 

Yuto flexes his fingers, they’re stiff from weeks of being idle. He’s aching for a pencil, he wants to sketch something.

_Hyunggu._

Wooseok clicks his tongue loudly, it’s his turn today to keep an eye on Yuto. The sound of machines in the hospital’s too rhythmic and it’s slowly starting to degenerate his intelligence. It’s no wonder half the patients here look pretty dead inside.

The taller boy’s standing near the window, his gaze focused on the file in his hands. It’s an assignment according to him, to profile unidentified criminals based off of actual case files. Wooseok always gets strange ones.

“You’re thinking about him again,” Wooseok says without looking up, “You know I’m starting to think that he’s some sort of ghost.”

Yuto rolls his eyes even though a very ominous feeling washes over his skin like sticky oil. He rubs at his arms and Wooseok immediately springs to his side, gaze intense and worried, “Are you cold?”

All this attention is embarrassing. He’s only here because during his fall he’d knocked the fuck out of his forehead and had ended up with a splitting wound and some bruised ribs.

(Actually, he’s here because he couldn’t stop screaming in his sleep and the doctors had thought that a psych eval and some monitoring would do him some good).

Yuto’s never been a fan of being the focus of attention so it’s making him very uncomfortable that both Changgu and Wooseok alternate to keep an eye on him. He’s an adult, he can watch himself.

Not to mention that he’s in  _a hospital._ The likelihood of something tragic happening to him was slim to none. He couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about, but he wasn’t going to question it because he’d have to sit through nagging.

He’d rather die than get nagged at.

“I’m not cold,” Yuto hisses, “And Hyunggu isn’t a ghost.”

Wooseok lifts his eyes to the heavens, “Jesus Christ.”

“I’m glad you’re working on your faith,” Changgu says from the bathroom, “But Wooseok’s right, it’s been two weeks and this boy’s a no-show. What kind of boyfriend did you get yourself?”

Yuto knows grinding his teeth is bad for him, but he can’t help himself. He’s going to hurl his IV drip stand at his friends.

“I have a photo. Ocular  _proof._ _”_ he avows, reaching for his phone. He feels Wooseok and Changgu hover over him and quickly clicks on the  _PHOTOS_ icon, revealing his camera roll.

The picture of Hyunggu is a fucking bright flash of light and it’s leaving him as baffled and confused as Wooseok and Changgu.

“Wow Adachi, truly remarkable. You really captured his eyes,” Changgu comments like a smartass he is, “I’m pretty sure I could take a decent shot even with my eyes closed.”

Yuto cuts him a glare and Changgu looks away quickly.

“I swear,” Yuto mumbles irritably, he must have forgotten to adjust the damned contrast, “I took his photo.”

Now, Yuto’s no photography major. He could have been, but he didn’t care for it. But he’s taken a shit ton of reference shots before and none of them had resulted in the subject turning into a bright flash of yellow light. It was humiliating.

“Okay fine, when I get discharged,” Yuto promises, “I’m hauling your asses to the gardens.”

“Cool,” Wooseok lifts up his hand, his forefinger pressing against his thumb to create a loop while the remaining fingers stayed raised, “When’s he getting released anyway?”

Changgu smirks, lifting up one finger.

“Today, fuckers.”

\-----

He’s here. 

Adachi Yuto is actually here and Hyunggu wants to run up to him and throw his arms around his neck and (maybe) kiss him on the lips but that would not only go against every single rule he’s ever made for himself, it would also be  _very_ _awkward._

Because with him is a  _very tall_ and hulking boy and another shorter, more delicately featured one. They must be his friends, Wooseok and Changgu, judging from the way they kept tugging on either of his arms. It kept tripping him and Hyunggu can’t help but chuckle from where he’s hiding from.

(Another tree. As usual.)

There’s something different about Yuto though, he’s a little slower while walking and as he turns his head to glare at the taller guy, Hyunggu can see a very large white patch on his forehead.

Had he been in an accident?

Hyunggu’s hands go clammy. Was that why he’d disappeared for two weeks? Because he’d been hurt?

Something very terrible aches in Hyunggu’s chest.

Yuto begins to call out his name,  _Hyunggu? Hyunggu where are you?_ and his friends echo this, almost like a joke.

He eclipses himself further behind the tree, fingers curling around the bark so hard that pieces break right off in chunks, covering his fingers with dust and dirt.

He remembers his old friends- much older now. They’d worked together, nearly breaking their backs from dusk to dawn. He’d been too fresh a face at the newspaper store and they’d taken him under their wing without needing to be asked. To Hyunggu they’d been more than friends, they’d been brothers almost.

He wonders where they are now. How they’re doing.

Do they remember him as often as he remembers them? Or was he just a fleeting memory to them- the boy they’d mentored and brought out to drinks even though he’d been below the age limit.

Yang Hongseok and Jo Jinho. He’d loved the fuck out of them even though they drove him half insane.

He misses them rather terribly, sometimes remembering the way their voices sounded like- when they were happy, when they were sad.

Jinho had this rule in the shop: that no one was allowed to mention his height. So naturally they did and Hyunggu remembers running through the corridors with Hongseok, laughing for miles while the oldest among the three chased after them like a rabid animal. He’d give anything to do that again, to hear the sound of Jinho’s firework of a laugh explode in his eardrums.

He’d give anything to have Hongseok surprise him with food because he knew that Hyunggu could go days without eating.

Hyunggu’s almost jealous that Yuto’s got friends like this, friends who clearly had his back and watched out for him and teased him and laughed at all the things he said without intending to be funny. 

But Hyunggu’s glad as well, that Yuto’s got people like that to rely on. People who will catch him if he fell. Hyunggu couldn’t do that.

He’d be the one falling apart.

Yuto continues to call out to him and even though everything in his soul is coiling to respond, he holds himself back.

Neko purrs, nuzzling his calves and then curling her body around it. He sees how confused Yuto looks, watches him bring his friends through the gardens. They’re teasing him again and he looks frustrated and unhappy.

Hyunggu’s never really seen Yuto unhappy and it makes his stomach coil aggressively. He must be searching for him to introduce his friends to.

Hyunggu can’t let that happen, not now and not ever. 

He watches them for a while until he notices that Yuto’s keeling over a little and his face isn’t golden anymore but a paler, sickly colour. He smiles anyway and  _god,_ it shouldn’t be possible to be smiling like the sun was in his teeth even though he was in pain.

\-----

Eventually his friends leave and it’s just Yuto, sighing into the sky with his head tilted back to face the sun. It wouldn’t take a genius to know that Hyunggu’s let him down somehow.

Hyunggu feels like he’s let himself down as well.

He waits, watching Yuto kick stones and wander around for a while. The rolled up sleeves of the dual-blue coloured plaid shirt unfolds and falls over his fingers and there’s something comely about it.

When Yuto settles down, sitting on a bench overlooking one of the ponds, Hyunggu gathers enough courage to walk over to him. Yuto only glances at him and then away, kicking at stray pebbles near his feet without much thought. The frogs begin to sing.

They’d sat here the first they they’d met.

Hyunggu takes a breath, feels it expand in his lungs and then like an exhale asks, “How are you?”

Yuto doesn’t look at him for a heartbeat (or several) and Hyunggu’s fingers prickle uncomfortably. 

“I’m okay,” clipped, enunciated. His eyes still don’t meet Hyunggu’s, not even a peek. Hyunggu doesn’t know if he should sit down beside him or not so he continues to stand, not quite sure what to do with himself.

“You,” _deep breaths Kang Hyunggu,_ “Did you hurt yourself?”

He sees Yuto’s slender shoulders tense, “No.”

“Your forehead,” all the confidence in his bones are gone now and he feels empty, he’s missed Yuto, all he wants is to talk to him normally again- to _feel normal_ , “It’s bandaged.”

“I fell,” Yuto says, kicks more stray pebbles, “No big deal.”

“But it is!” Hyunggu bursts and _this_ has enough power to turn Yuto around, “It matters to me.”

“You didn’t come for the party,” anger flares scarlet in Yuto’s eyes then, “You could have told me!”

“What’s the matter with you?” Hyunggu’s exasperated, he can’t understand what’s going through Yuto’s head, he can’t understand anything. He didn’t fucking die over and over and over just for Yuto to come and rip all the holes in his heart wide open.

“Nothing!” Yuto rises suddenly like a shot bullet, throwing his hands in the air, “There’s nothing wrong with me! The problem is you!”

 _“Me?”_ Hyunggu scoffs, “Fucking hell Adachi, I said I’ll _try_ to come!”

“Watch yourself,” Yuto grows quieter, seething and this is a side of Yuto that’s both terrifying and new to Hyunggu, it’s always the quiet rage that festered and grew into monsters and Hyunggu knew it all too well, “I know you were here the entire time.”

Hyunggu can’t argue. He’s right.

He’s probably embarrassed and feeling like an idiot because he’d brought his friends over to meet him and he’d hidden himself from them.

“You’re acting like a baby,” Hyunggu quips, he knows he should stop. Yuto hadn’t done anything wrong, it had been  _him_ but all the anger that’s moulded into his body is breaking free like a broken dam and he can’t fucking stop.

“A baby?” Yuto echoes, his brows pulling together, nostrils flaring. The arcane anger in his eyes intensifies, “Hyunggu it wasn’t  _me_ who intentionally hid away. And it definitely wasn’t  _me_ who made someone look like a fool, calling out for someone who was in the vicinity but refusing to show himself!”

“I was nervous!” Hyunggu bellows, “I’m allowed to be nervous, right?”

“Jesus,” Yuto swears, pinching the bridge of his nose so hard the skin pinks, “I’m leaving.”

“Leave then!” Hyunggu fumes, turning away impudently. He’d made a mistake, sure, but he didn’t deserve crap like this.

\-----

God,  _god._ Yuto doesn’t remember the last time he’d felt this much anger, bubbling inside out him with so much pressure he’s sure that it’s going to blow out of his ears and nose. He just couldn’t understand.

What the hell was so troubling about just showing himself? It wasn’t so much to ask for- Yuto hadn’t asked for Hyunggu’s liver or his first born or to give up his entire inheritance to him. All he’d wanted was to introduce his idiot friends to the person he’d spent weeks in love with.

He’d dragged the dumbasses right from the hospital all the way to this fucking gardens just so say hello. Was he going to make them meet for long? No. Was he going to force a friendship unto Hyunggu? No.

All Adachi Yuto had wanted was to put the light back in Hyunggu’s eyes because he’s seen how forlorn Hyunggu looked when he saw groups of people gathered, how Hyunggu had mentioned once in passing that he’d had friends before but how they’ve all probably forgotten about him. All Yuto wanted was to put stars in Hyunggu’s smile because he deserved nothing less than the universe.

Yuto had fallen in love with Hyunggu like a drizzle before a storm; slowly at first, not really realising until it came all at once, the pouring rain and the cut of lightning and claps of screaming thunder. Yuto had fallen and he didn’t know how to get up from there.

When he looks at Hyunggu, with all that anger and sadness in his eyes he knows, he just  _knows_ that he’s completely fucked himself over here. Kang Hyunggu is damaged goods and he’s known for the longest time. It’s there, in the corners of his eyes to the downward curve of his lips. Kang Hyunggu has been through hell and back and Yuto wants to protect him, to wrap his arms around him and press his head to his chest and tell him that he’ll always be there for him. He wasn’t going to let him down, not now and not ever.

But he’s angry and he’s disappointed and Yuto’s never been the kind of person to lash out at others, he swallows his rage and lets it dissolve into his bloodstream. He’ll come back when he’s calmer. When he’s ready to stop the dissonant thump of his heartbeat in his chest.

Hyunggu is absolutely stunning when he is angry. It’s like there is colour to him, burning ambers and golds. 

He sighs, feeling hollowed out and tired. Everything hurts from his body to his mind to his soul. Yuto wants to rest, maybe for a very long time. 

 _Leave then!_ He will.

Yuto turns, his throat thick and chest filling with smoke. Anywhere but here would be good. As long as he doesn’t have to see that damned poltergeist in Hyunggu’s eyes he’ll be find. 

He starts to walk away, with the wind picking up and swirling dried up leaves around him with a crackle. It’s like something out of a movie, the sky turning a darker blue and the air filling with the scent of fresh grass. Yuto bites down on his lower lip, hard.

He’d barely taken a step when he feels something tug firmly on his sleeve and he whirls around, brows pulling. 

Nothing in the entire goddamn universe could have prepared him for this and he’s pretty fucking sure that Hyunggu wasn’t prepared either because he had his fingers wrapped around the material of Yuto’s shirt so tightly he thought that his bones were going to pop right out of his skin in a blossom of blood and muscle.

“I...” Hyunggu breathes out and it’s wavy and soft and uncertain and Yuto doesn’t know what to do with all that’s unfolding in front of him right now, “I can touch you.”

Yes he could. And Yuto watches very carefully to make sure that Hyunggu wasn’t going to spontaneously combust or break out in rashes or drop dead because that’s what Yuto’s been assuming as the reason why Hyunggu couldn’t touch people. His gaze shifts between Hyunggu’s white-knuckled grip on his sleeve to Hyunggu’s magnificently pale face.

The smile that cracks across Hyunggu’s face- like every dark and evil thing in the world had just been destroyed- had the power to end wars and bring men to their knees. Yuto’s never seen Hyunggu smile like this before, like he could have been a god himself. If Hyunggu was a religion, Yuto would have been down on his knees praying already.

Did he know how much power he held over Yuto with just that one smile? 

His grip tightens further and his gaze flicks up to meet Yuto’s and he’s right: the entire galaxy is caught in his eyes as though that was where everything originated from. Kang Hyunggu, the creator of the universe.

Yuto would have believed that. If Yuto had the power he would have created an entire world just for Hyunggu.

“Adachi,” Hyunggu says and his voice is sultry, smooth like heated chocolate. Yuto’s mouth goes dry.

There’s one thing about Yuto: before pursuing the arts he was a sports boy. Every time a club needed a player, he’d be there and he always excelled in whatever game he was made to participate in. Perhaps this could have been attributed to his quick response time and the way he wielded whatever equipment he had like an extension of himself. Yuto’s rarely ever caught off guard because he was quick, he was agile and he was very, very sharp.

But those were the basic rules of Adachi Yuto’s life and they somehow didn’t apply to Kang Hyunggu because Yuto barely had time to breathe or think or move before Hyunggu’s hands clasped around the round collar of his grey shirt and he’s yanked down- lips landing clumsily against Hyunggu’s firm ones.

And he’s falling, ten thousand miles per second into Hyunggu’s heart. Every rational thought in his head evaporates like smoke and that’s perfectly fine.

Hyunggu’s eyes are closed and he looks like he knows what he’s doing. Yuto’s seen kisses hundreds of times before because Changgu loved to torture him with romcoms but he’s never kissed anyone before and certainly, never kissed anyone with anger still humming through his body like a well oiled machine, yet he falls into it as easily as it would be for him to mix colours in a palette.

There’s just something about Hyunggu, something absolutely perfect about him that just sucks everything- every thought and worry and second guesses- out of Yuto but he sinks into it, because Hyunggu isn’t warm or soft, he’s made out of sharp edges and his skin’s cold. 

Yuto kisses Hyunggu back with a mouthful of forevers and hands that were unsteady for the first time in his life. Yuto allows himself to sink and disappear and he can hear his heart beat violently, getting pulled with all of the mass of the earth by someone as small and soft as Kang Hyunggu.

Kang Hyunggu who could probably make mountains bow to him, Kang Hyunggu with the poltergeist in his eyes and sadness written across his lips. Yuto sinks and falls and rises and he knows what love is now.

Love is brown eyes and a sad smile and the smell of earth after rain. Love is Kang Hyunggu and he is going to hold on to tightly it with both hands.

\-----

 


	8. Chapter 8

There was something about love that made colours vibrant, and whenever Yuto looked over at flowers and trees and grass he thought that everything looked like it had just been given a fresh coat of paint by an expert painter. He’s never seen blues so bright and reds so flammable and yellow so soothing before. Even as he reaches out to stroke petals and leaves, he half expects the pigment to rub off on his finger tips and stain them. 

When Yuto breathes, he knows that he’s alive.

He dips his brush into paint, watching it’s thick consistency spread around the soft bristles. It’s the colour purple, because you add purple to shadows instead of grey. Grey tends to leave the final result empty and lifeless. 

Like Hyunggu’s eyes sometimes when he thinks Yuto isn’t looking.

He lifts the brush up, poises his hand in front of his canvas, adjusting his wrist and fingers so that his hold’s more delicate than rough. It’s all about mathematics- gauging the exact angle to hold the brush (forty-five degrees) and at which part to keep his fingers around (near the bristles for a more controlled application). He presses the tip of the brush against an uncoloured portion of his painting, going in slowly at first and then pulling it across the canvas in short, quick strokes.

The trick’s not to go in with too much, to slowly build up the colour so that there was more dictation with the application.

Hyunggu rustles and Yuto’s first instinct is to click his tongue, “You’re moving too much,” he complains, “Stay still.”

“I’m,” Hyunggu answers crossly, “Sitting in a _very uncomfortable_ position and my legs are cramping you idiot.”

Yuto looks over the top of his canvas and at Hyunggu, bright and shining in a field of small daisies. He makes nature look subpar in comparison.

Hyunggu is a masterpiece, created from the finest materials.

“Didn’t you say you were a dancer once?” Yuto goes back to painting, mixing the purples in with just a touch of grey, creating a shadow cutting across Hyunggu’s jaw to create further dimension to his face. His hands shake the slightest bit because he doesn’t know if he could bring justice to Hyunggu’s beauty- if immortalising him in a painting would _truly_ capture his essence and aura.

Would his audience feel Hyunggu just from looking at this painting? Could they identify the poltergeist in his eyes? The anger that lurked in the corners of his mouth? The love and compassion in the curves of his features?

“I did,” Hyunggu’s tone is slightly clipped and Yuto pauses, looking over the top of his canvas once again. Hyunggu’s gaze is far away. Sometimes when he spoke about his life he sounded like he was speaking about another time altogether. As though he was still living in his past, trapped there like a butterfly in a jar. Yuto imagines the way his broken wings would flutter- erratic and hastily, bumping against the sides of the glass. He’d break his own wings just to free himself.

He’d die encased.

Yuto doesn’t ask about Hyunggu’s life- not often, anyway- but every time Hyunggu  _did_ mention about how he’d lived Yuto felt a pressure against his chest, a palm pushing against him. A warning.

_Don’t ask. You’ll hurt him._

So Yuto doesn’t question things, even though sometimes Hyunggu did seem like a hollowed out vessel.

“It was my dream,” ruefully his lips curl, “Anyway dancing’s expensive and realistically I’d have been broke by my twe-” he stops so suddenly Yuto’s brows knit together, “Adachi, Neko’s about to walk all over your paints again.”

“What?” Yuto turns quickly, just in time to catch the damned cat standing above his palette, one paw raised over his purple paint. It eyes him, emerald gaze teasing and knowing and mischievous. The last time Yuto had ignored that gaze (to his defence he thought Neko was adorable), the cat had stepped into his paints and then had proceeded to walk all over his lap. He’d returned to his dorms with white paw prints all over his clothes.

Wooseok had called him pitiful and then had proceeded to take pictures of his miserable attire and send it to everyone.

Needless to say, Wooseok’s snacks had mysteriously disappeared from their fridge that night.

“You’re still broke though,” Yuto teases, re-dipping his brush into paint, “Don’t try to defend yourself.”

Hyunggu huffs, but Yuto catches the little smile across his face, lighting up the entire galaxy. 

He likes to paint Hyunggu because he’s just this omnipotent being, and Yuto is completely under his control.

\-----

Later when Yuto’s tired of painting, he pulls Hyunggu out of their secret spot to stroll around the gardens. It’s emptier today, pray for a few elderly who’d come to enjoy the flowers.

Yuto spots an older man leaning over a bush of deep pink flowers, squinting his aged eyes and writing down notes about it in a tiny notebook. He wonders why old people liked using small things- small phones, small pens, small notebooks.

It’s serene today and Yuto can breathe somehow. Changgu used to tell him that the garden was a place he could go to if his mind ever became heavy, and as an artist, Yuto always found that to be. He enjoyed pulling out a person’s vulnerability in his work, but he never spoke about how the darkness in people lingered on his fingertips long after the piece was completed.

Hyunggu slides his fingers into Yuto’s hand, curling them around his softly like the wings of a butterfly.

Hyunggu’s hands aren’t soft or smooth, they’re calloused and tough. Yuto’s still surprised every time they touch- more subconsciously than not- because Hyunggu’s edges aren’t sharp, not like they used to be, and Yuto isn’t cut anymore. He gives his hand a reassuring squeeze and everything isn’t so terrible.

Yuto often wonders what it would be like if they swapped places; if he were to spend a day in Hyunggu’s shoes, to encounter the poltergeist that lived so ardently in his gaze. And what would Hyunggu feel living in his? His simple, boring, methodical life. Yuto’s biggest hardship was struggling with the little voice in his head that kept telling him that he wasn’t good enough, that there were better people out there who deserved far more than he did.

 _Who are you,_ the voices say,  _to dream big?_

So he hadn’t, he didn’t reach for goals that seemed to far off or hoped for things that were seemingly impossible. Wooseok always told him to fly, but Yuto feels too tired to keep trying to take flight when all that’s going to happen is that he’s going to crash right into earth like a meteor missing it’s trajectory.

Hyunggu tells him about his upbringing, tells him that all he’s ever known was dancing. He tells him that times became hard, that he’d had to give up on that dream of his. He tells Yuto that a part of him misses dancing, that a part of him longs to feel like a person again.

And Yuto says, “But _you are_ a person.”

He smiles softly, “I am _your_ person.”

He tells Yuto that there are times he forgets that he’s dead inside, that Yuto’s managed to make him feel alive again. He tells Yuto that even if the earth split into two he wouldn’t leave him. He tells Yuto that he is more scar than skin, that he wears his wounds like an armour on his body.

Yuto tells him that he’s not afraid of the scars on his skin. 

They come to the edge of the pond and Yuto leans over the water, watching his reflection ripple with the delicate dance of the water’s waves. He is distorted and shadowed and when he looks at himself he remembers the snow and the blood and Hyunggu laying in it with a cry left in his voiceless throat. Yuto squats down and dips his finger into the water, letting the liquid create circular ripples and fade away.

“You should come over,” he beckons to Hyunggu and the other boy falters, a tight smile spreading across his cheeks. He shakes his head.

“It’s okay I’m not a fan of water.”

Yuto wants to tell him that he’s not a fan of a lot of things. He’d once told Hyunggu that he couldn’t handle spicy food and the other boy had taken full offence.

The water is warm, and Yuto catches sight of a few fishes wandering about. He splashes at them and watches the fish scurry away, beating their fins in a wild rhythm and swimming as far away from him as possible. He laughs, remembering how he’d used to do things like this with Wooseok when they were dead drunk in the middle of the night. Wooseok had fallen into the school pond once and Yuto had taken forty minutes in his half-sober state to pull him out.

(They’d passed out in the middle of their dorm, not anywhere close to their beds).

He can feel Hyunggu’s presence beside him, a soft shadow falling over his skin but he isn’t standing close enough to the water because his reflection doesn’t get cast. Instead the head of his black cat appears, staring intently at the fish inside.

Yuto dips his fingers into the water again, scooping it up and splashing it at the cat. Neko screeches, darting away and he laughs.

“You cover your mouth when you laugh,” Hyunggu comments, squatting down beside him. He reaches for Yuto’s arms, wrapping his rough fingers around his wrist and pulling it away from his mouth. Yuto hadn’t realised that he did that. “I like to hear your laugh.”

Yuto is falling again, his heart dipping and rising and blazing into infinity.

He doesn’t notice how damaged Hyunggu’s hands are until then, noting skin that’s peeling away from blunt nails. He’s got scars all over his skin as well, little jagged scars of silvery raised flesh. Yuto strokes his thumb over them and Hyunggu stiffens.

He tries to pull his hands away but Yuto won’t let him, instead holding them up closer to his face and turning them around, pressing his fingers into the curves and crevices of Hyunggu’s pained hands. His fingers are boney and slightly crooked. 

And they’re cold.

Hyunggu doesn’t feel warm, just icy. Yuto  _wants_ to hold his hands forever and feel his skin against his but Hyunggu’s so chilly that sometimes Yuto’s teeth begin to chatter. He wonders why Hyunggu’s body is so cold when his soul was an uncontrollable forest fire.

He wonders why Hyunggu sometimes starts to tell him something and then lets his voice fade away like the wind. 

Hyunggu has a habit of speaking in obituaries and apologies.

“I have labourer hands,” Hyunggu starts to laugh, thick and heavy like someone’s banging a drum too hard, “They’re ugly.”

“No they’re not,” Yuto opposes firmly, pressing the tips of Hyunggu’s chilly fingers to his lips, allowing the warmth of his breath to put some heat into him, “You have pretty hands.”

Hyunggu doesn’t attempt to contend him, instead his gaze grows arcane. He reaches out to Yuto with his other hand, pressing it against his cheek. Yuto can’t read his gaze, but there’s something there definitely, lurking inside of his dark eyes.

A secret.

A terrible, painful secret that’s on the tip of Hyunggu’s tongue. A secret Yuto knows he would rather die with than tell him.

Hyunggu kisses his cheeks then his forehead and his eyelids and then his lips and Yuto sighs because he wants to know about this demon, he wants to know the reason for the poltergeist in Hyunggu’s gaze.

He can handle it. He can handle anything Hyunggu threw at him.

Because he loves Kang Hyunggu sincerely, purely, truly. 

Eternally.

“One day,” Hyunggu breathes, pressing his forehead against Yuto’s and Yuto’s heart seems to skid to a stop, “One day I’ll tell you everything. So until then,” Yuto holds his breath, “Until then just keep loving me.”

Yuto tells Hyunggu that he’ll love him forever.

\-----

Yuto grabs on to the bag tightly, his heart pounding so hard that it’s jumping in his throat. Hyunggu’s mentioned how much he’d wanted to dance again and Yuto couldn’t stop thinking about it.

So he’d gone and gotten him a pair of dancing shoes. They weren’t too expensive (Yuto tells himself this even though he knows that he doesn’t have any more money to buy new paints if he needed them) so knowing Hyunggu, he’d be less likely to feel bad for wanting to accept them.

Thing is, Yuto’s not nervous about getting his gift rejected (he’d saved up for weeks for this), he’s worried that his surprise for Hyunggu would get ruined. 

He’d planned it all out meticulously- even consulting a crime expert (Wooseok) on the perfect way of going in and out of a place without getting detected by the target. (Of course Wooseok just called him stupid, “You should just give it to him straight up, Jesus you’re cheesy as fuck.”)

So that’s  _exactly_ what Yuto’s _not_ doing. He doesn’t know Hyunggu’s work schedule so this is going to be based off on assumption and a huge amount of luck. If he suddenly ran into Hyunggu, he was going to pretend that he’d come to make prints for his online art store.

Which, technically, did not exist. But he knew Shinwon owend one so from all that he’s heard from him, he knows how to craft a decent enough lie.

However that’s also assuming that Hyunggu didn’t know what the hell he was talking about (because Yuto knows he didn’t whenever Shinwon mentioned ‘making prints’).

Finding the printing shop was relatively easy, it’s a quaint looking place that sat between a minimart and a free rental space. It’s also the only printing place in an entire stretch of shops and it looked like it could only hold about five people at a time.

“Yes?” the person at the counter- a gruff looking old man with a map of constellations marking every corner of his aged face- asks. His eyes are kind though, which seemed to throw off he way his features synergised.

“Uh,” Yuto feels dumb, “I’m... looking for someone.”

The old man motions for him to walk in and Yuto’s immediately hit with the scent of fresh paper and ink. There’s a pathetic lemongrass air-freshener in the corner that was doing absolutely nothing.

“Who?”

Yuto clears his throat, “Uh, Hyunggu? Kang Hyunggu?”

The old man blinks at him. “Does he work here?”

 _Jesus_ did this guy not know his colleagues? Or staff? “Well... yes. He’s a paperboy here.”

The old man blinks again, this time looking more lost than the first time. “Kid, we haven’t had paperboys here for almost twenty years.”

What?

“Well, he said he works here. He’s about this tall,” Yuto motions with his hands to a height, “Dark hair, very pale.”  _very handsome._

The old man shakes his head slowly, brows pulled together in careful consideration, “I don’t think we have an employee here by that name, son.”

Yuto’s brows knit. It couldn’t be, solely because this was the only printing place across the garden. Yuto should definitely be at the right place.

This guy must be confused.

Judging by the way the man’s looking very perplexed, Yuto decides that it would be easier for him if he just sought Hyunggu out. If he were to ask this old man for any more help, he’s sure that he’d be seventy with arthritis before he could find Hyunggu.

“That’s okay then,” Yuto apologises and gives the older man a short bow before ducking out of the store. 

It was strange that the guy didn’t remember Hyunggu. Maybe Yuto just wasn’t being specific enough.

 _Something is off though,_ Yuto thinks. He doesn’t know what, but it’s crawling up his spine ominously. When he looks up at the sky it’s a threatening grey, and the inner artist within him is on high alert.

Something is off and something is going to happen. Yuto can feel it in the change of the wind.

He’s not quite sure why, but he feels as though he’s about to get violently knocked right off of his feet.

\-----

 


	9. Chapter 9

“Is this...” Wooseok’s voice breaks through the languor of the room, cutting through the silence like a sharp arrow, shattering it with a crack, “Hyunggu?”

Yuto despondently makes a sound, affirming Wooseok’s query. 

“I mean I’d compliment your drawings,” he lifts the sketchbook Yuto’s filled pages with sketches of Hyunggu, “But you’ve always been really good.”

Yuto hums another reply.

“Also, is there a reason why you’re just staring at the window?”

Yuto blinks, “Oh, right. Sorry,” he adjusts himself, leaning back in the chair he’d heavily settled into. He can’t quiet his thoughts, hasn’t been able to ever since he’d returned from the printing shop. He could feel something shift within him, a crawling realisation to the surface. 

Something about Hyunggu was  _off._

Yuto wants to talk about it, but he’s got no one to turn to. Neither Changgu nor Wooseok’s seen him so they couldn’t gauge what Hyunggu was like and what they _did_ know about him came from pestering Yuto relentlessly. He wants to release the pressure in his chest. His circulating thoughts are slowly drumming into a migraine.

Perhaps he  _could_ ask Wooseok. He’s a criminal psychologist major anyway, he’s done modules on profiling. Wooseok is reliable that way because he was always able to tell more about the person just from their actions. He could figure out what’s really bothering Yuto.

He knows that Hyunggu’s got secrets, but he’d like to give the benefit of the doubt that Hyunggu told him truths (or half truths). There are some things that he knows cannot be said out loud- because sometimes verbalising something was validating it. And Hyunggu seemed like he was running from a hundred different things all at once.

Yuto should have asked him questions, should have drawn all the darkness out of him to the surface. They’d have worked through it together, he knows they would. He couldn’t heal Hyunggu or take away his pain forever. He wasn’t a panacea, but he’d have been a shoulder to rely on and hands to hold on to when Hyunggu trembled too much.

“How good is your profiling skills?” Yuto asks, turning to face Wooseok. The taller boy’s leaning against their bed, an opened case file laying flat on the palms of his hands. He’s in the midst of an assignment, Yuto realises, but his attention’s been diverted to Yuto’s sketchbook as it always did. Wooseok got distracted easily when he wasn’t in the mood to study.

The taller boy looks offended, stepping away from the bed and pressing his fists to his hips, “Just so you know, dumbass, that I’ve been told that I’m a  _very_ promising student.”

“What if,” Yuto pulls his lips into his mouth, lets go, “Never mind.” it’s probably dumb, he’s probably overthinking things. It hadn’t been this way before- not from when he’d first met Hyunggu. So why, so why did it somehow feel like Yuto’s missing something very important?

Yuto always thought he was being considerate not asking about that bloody poltergeist in Hyunggu’s eyes but now the curiosity is turning his blood blue. What is it, what is he missing?

“Is this about your boyfriend?” Wooseok sighs, “I’m not the best person to ask about stuff like this...”

“It’s not complicated,” Yuto pushes out of his chair urgently, “And I don’t need  _friend_ Wooseok for this. I need  _detective_ Wooseok.”

Wooseok’s brows pull together and his lips press into a line. Yuto can see the confusion in his friend’s gaze- a confusion that’s mirroring his own. There’s something dark and looming in the air that’s making his skin prickle with awareness.

“What would you do... if you felt like something was off about a person?”

Wooseok’s frown deepens, “Feel like something is off? Like he’s lying to you or something?”

Yuto pauses, bites down on his lips, released, “Something like that.”

“That’s not very helpful,” Wooseok grumbles, rubs a hand over his face. Yuto sees the way his shoulders tighten and his feet spread apart. His features contort into a more serious expression, gaze focused and alert, “You know what I thought was really weird about your boyfriend?”

Yuto’s chewing on his bottom lip nervously, responding to Wooseok with a mumbled, “Hm?” a part of him  _doesn’t_ want to know. He should just walk right out of the room and pretend like he’d never asked.

Pretending. He’s been doing that for days now. Pretending that the odd feelings were just nonsense, pretending that he didn’t quietly notice all the strange things about Hyunggu.

“You don’t have his phone number-”

“We meet everyday at the gardens,” Yuto interjects, his fingers going icy and his head feeling light.

“ _And_ he wears the exact same clothes,” Wooseok lifts up Yuto’s sketchbook and taps against all the little sketches spanning across two pages. Yuto wants to tell Wooseok that that isn’t strange, but it’s dawning to him that it  _was_ a little odd. Even on weekends when they met Hyunggu wore the same thing, when Yuto asked once he’d gotten shaky, and with eyes not meeting his had said that he’d had to replace someone. 

There isn’t anything wrong with that... right? He’d explained it to Yuto once before. But there’s a malignant voice that asks Yuto  _even on Sundays?_

“It’s his work uniform.”

Wooseok’s face scrunches, “Really? These look like clothes from the nineties.”

“He’s a paperboy,” Yuto’s finding it harder to breathe now, images of Hyunggu dying flashing in his brain like flashcards. The crushing realisation that Hyunggu’s secrets might be perilous begins to prick painfully at his skin. What was he hiding? What trouble did he get into?

He thinks about all the scars on Hyunggu’s skin- was he involved in some sort of dangerous group? Or situation? 

“Yuto... I don’t think that’s a relevant occupation anymore.” Wooseok says indignantly as though his friend was just  _stupid._

Yuto’s heart squeezes and his hands go up to his throat, feeling his pule flutter viciously underneath the pads of his fingers.

“And above all, I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that he’s _always_ at the gardens. I mean if he’s working, shouldn’t he be- you know- at  _work?_ _”_

“Maybe he has his reasons. Maybe he goes to the gardens for break.”

Yuto feels like a nitwit trying to explain and defend Hyunggu at this point. Wooseok is intelligent and meticulous. He must have been wondering about these details for a while because the way he’s asking is direct and sharp.

“You need to sit him down and talk to him because something’s clearly shady about him,” Wooseok taps his case file, “No offence, but if he involves you in something that’s dangerous I’m not just going to sit by and watch him destroy you. You’re a good kid, Yuto, but you’re also stupid as fuck sometimes. My advice? If he’s involved in some shady shit, you’d better leave him. But, hey, that’s just _detective_ Wooseok speaking. _Friend_ Wooseok would beat the shit out of his ass.”

 _Something’s_ _shady about him_ , Yuto agrees even if he doesn’t want to. The doubts come at him like parasites, settling themselves in his brain, planting themselves firmly there. He can’t help but think of all the times Hyunggu’s been strange, all the times Yuto’s said something and it had triggered something in Hyunggu.

He shouldn’t think like this. 

“Whatever,” Yuto waves his hands in hopes to dispel all the uncertainty bleeding inside his system, “What are you working on?”

“This?” Wooseok sighs out loudly, handing the file over to Yuto. It’s clearly been used to the point Yuto could almost say that the thing’s been abused. The edges of the file is all wrinkled and soft like cloth and Yuto can see the marks left behind in the shape of Wooseok’s fingers.

“I’m supposed to profile a killer. Or kidnapper, I don’t know. All we have are vague details of the victim.”

Yuto flips the cover open, eyeing wrinkled sheets of paper. The victim’s male and in his late teens to early twenties, about five foot eight inches in height. There’s a photograph attached of a man, grinning like there are stars in his eyes. Yuto flips through the file, finding images of the same guy in a ditch with blood all over him. It’s a grainy image with faded colours, but even then Yuto can make out the obvious cause of death: blunt force trauma to the skull.

“Your lecturer must be really creative,” Yuto says, “This almost seems like it’s a real case.”

Wooseok sighs again, “I  _wish_. Trust me, I think I’d be able to bullshit something and get away with it. This one’s real.”

“Has the killer been found?” Yuto stares at the paper with all the details again, something heavy and burning filling his stomach.

“Nope,” Wooseok says, his lips popping, “They’ve stopped investigating though. My guess? Our John Doe here’s was killed by someone he knew pretty well. I mean, autopsy reports state that this guy didn’t retaliate. This _must _ be a crime of passion. Maybe by a lover or something.”

“Yeah,” Yuto laughs, but it’s weak because something feels like it’s squeezing around his throat.  _Five foot eight inches, late teens to early twenties._

\-----

A part of Yuto doesn’t want to see Hyunggu- not because he’s been overthinking their relationship- but because the seeds of doubt planted in him would make him look at Hyunggu differently. And unlike most people, Yuto wouldn’t call himself a great actor.

More times than not he wore his heart on his sleeve- and according to Changgu it was very easy to read him.

 _Hence,_ being a fake Aquarius. Hyunggu would take one look at him and know that something was wrong.

Yuto almost wants to stop going to the gardens, almost wants Hyunggu to come to him for once. There had never been a problem with their unspoken arrangement: every time Yuto went to the gardens Hyunggu would be there. There were no questions asked or no skepticism as to why Hyunggu was always waiting for him.

It had always been pure and simple comfort: comfort in nature, comfort in each other. Perhaps it was this comfort that had Yuto overlooking the smaller, finer, grittier details of their relationship. He was always happy to see Hyunggu and he never once thought about how it was strange that their coincidental meetings almost always seemed constructed.

He steps into the gardens, this time his hands are empty and his heart is hollow. Overhead, the sky tinges grey- the colour seeping and tainting all the blue. That same feeling of being violently knocked off his feet begins to tingle in his toes.

There’s a shift in the air, a crackle in the wind. Yuto is about to do something he knows will hurt Hyunggu.

And it’s hurting him too.

He doesn’t see Neko, in fact, the first person he sees when he wanders into the gardens is The Gardener. Hyunggu’d told him once that that’s what he called the hardened old man, “He has no other name,” he’d said, his gaze glassy and empty, “Just The Gardener. Capital T, capital G.”

Yuto doesn’t know why, but he walks up to the man.

“You come here often, don’t you?” the old man asks, his voice gruff from age and all the nicotine in his body. He’s aged, face a map of spiderwebs and eyes that were simultaneously gruff and vulnerable. This was a strong man, Yuto notes, because there is more muscle than skin on him.

It must be all the gardening.

“Yes, sir,” Yuto replies, shoving his hands into his pockets. He’s not good with having conversations with strangers, he just doesn’t know what to  _say,_ and this makes it worse because it’s an elderly man. The most Yuto can come up with is, “You have a beautiful garden.”

The Gardener seems amused for some reason, “And you are an artist?”

“No sir,” Yuto bites his bottom lip and lets go, “I am someone who does art.”

“Is that not the same thing?”

It isn’t. An artist is someone who’s art is an extension of himself, when the lines between reality and artistry become woven and blurred. Yuto only knows art as something he’s good yet. He’s never reached the point of thinking that art lived inside of him.

He doesn’t have enough confidence for that.

“It’s not, sir.”

The older man seems to regard this for a while, “You don’t have your supplies with you today.”

“Ah,” Yuto’s embarrassed now, rubbing his elbows because he doesn’t know what to do with his hands (they’re suddenly too long and too exposed), “I came to see my boyfriend.”

 _Boyfriend._ It feels funny coming out from Yuto’s mouth sometimes. He’s had to say it over and over and over until he felt like it was coming from his mouth as easy as it would be when he was talking about the weather.

Now he mutters it like a promise, like a prayer.

“What’s his name?” 

“Hyunggu,” Yuto’s cheeks inflame, “Kang Hyunggu.”

“Hyunggu?” 

And something changes. All the harsh lines of The Gardener’s face accentuates and suddenly it’s like his eyes are glowing. Yuto watches all the softness of the old man fade away and something harder, angrier, rougher replaces it.

Yuto barely has time to breathe before The Gardener’s hands reach out, fingers wrapping tightly around his upper arms. Pain scores its way through Yuto’s body and his heart jumps into his throat.

He’s never seen such lividness in someone’s eyes before and Yuto’s almost certain this person isn’t human.

_“What did you say?”_

“I,” Yuto feels panic against his neck, pulling at him with it’s clawed fingers, “I don’t understand.”

“What’s his  _name?_ ”

“Hy-Hyunggu,” Yuto’s legs begin to shake because the darkness in The Gardener’s face intensifies, until he looked almost like a demon. 

“It can’t be,” The Gardener whispers, his tone wavering and Yuto wants to grab his collar and ask him what he meant by that. Because things aren’t making sense and Yuto’s thinking about how Hyunggu’s icy and pale and how he smiled like there was only sadness that living within the gaps of his teeth.

Yuto can’t stop the way his heart’s crashing and burning in his chest.

“Please let me go,” he manages to say weakly. The Gardener doesn’t- not at first- because his chest is rising and falling like the tides of a stormy sea and his gaze is wide and panicked and if Yuto thought he’d seen a poltergeist in Hyunggu’s eyes- this man had some sort of phantom living in his.

When The Gardener finally releases Yuto, he stumbles back rubbing his sore arms. The Gardener doesn’t move for a long time.

“You,” his voice comes like a crack of thunder, “Run along now.”

But it’s not Yuto that runs, it’s him. Yuto watches The Gardener stride away quickly as though there is fire burning in his heels.

 _What the fuck_ _?_

Yuto’s starting to think that he’s going crazy or that he’s in some other weirdly cruel dimension that’s distorting his reality. 

And his head hurts like someone’s hammering from inside of it.

He sighs, still rubbing his arms and when he turns around he sees Hyunggu standing behind him, his eyes empty and lips pulling into a sad smile. It’s that poltergeist.

For the first time, Yuto thinks that Hyunggu looks like an apparition. It’s in the way his edges are so soft they looked blurred, it’s the way his skin’s so pale it looked just like moonlight. Yuto’s always noted the darkness around his eyes, but he’s always passed it off as a lack of sleep. Right now as he’s staring at him, with the sky a malevolent shade of ash, Hyunggu doesn’t look human.

 _“Come with me,”_ he hears Hyunggu say, his sound almost soft and smooth- a song-, _“I have something to show you.”_

Yuto wants to call out to him but his throat’s suddenly dry, his tongue useless and vacant of words in his mouth. He takes a step toward Hyunggu, his gaze fixated on him.

He’s fucking beautiful.

Hyunggu’s hands reach out for him and he takes it, sliding his digits into callous and broken hands. He’s smiling at him, but his lips don’t meet his eyes. It’s sadness that Yuto sees and he wants to hold on to him and tear away all that melancholy that’s stuck to his skin like a stubborn film of oil. 

Hyunggu shakes his head when Yuto tries to reach out and touch his face, instead he says, “I’m about to hurt you very much Yuto.” and his voice is echoing in Yuto’s ears like a haunted cry.

Has Hyunggu’s skin always glowed this way? 

“I don’t understand,” Yuto mumbles, smoke filling his lungs, “Hyunggu-”

“Just hold on,” Hyunggu’s voice breaks like a thousand pieces and his eyes are glistening, Yuto sees a peek of scarlet running along the collar of his shirt. He doesn’t understand.

Why is it that the darkness of the sky is illuminating Hyunggu in a way that’s both beautiful and terrifying?

“It’s going to rain soon,” Hyunggu says, “And then it’s going to be night.”

“Hyunggu-”

“Once night befalls us,” his speech changes, becoming older, “You will understand.”

\-----

Hyunggu didn’t think that it would actually come down to  _this._ And his heart’s breaking a million times over, his fingers still inside of Yuto’s hands. There’s so many things he wants to say, so many times he’s wanted to tell him that he loves him.

Hyunggu thinks he’s loved Yuto from the day they’d met, when the sun had hit his caramel skin just right and he looked at him like there was tenderness and absolution still present in the world. It’s been many years since Hyunggu’s felt kindness and warmth and Yuto was the first person to offer these things to him. 

And he loves him, with all his heart and with all his might but when night came, when nights  _come_ he knows that Yuto can never love him the same way ever again. It just wasn’t possible.

Because with the night along came his secrets and he knows it’s time. It’s time to reveal the darkness that’s been festering in the bottom of his soul for years, it’s time to reveal the demons that lived on the underside of his tongue.

But not yet, not right now. Because Hyunggu needs to have his say, he needs Yuto to know that he’s patched back parts of him that he never know could heal. He needs Yuto to know that his soul was black like the night and black like the ashes after a fire and Yuto brought light into his darkness.

He needs Yuto to know that he’s loved before and that he’s been broken because of it and he’d never thought he could ever love again. Not until him. Not until Yuto.

So Hyunggu leads him through the gardens, feeling the sky darken to grey and then indigo on his back. Yuto never asked questions, he never did before either and maybe that’s why Hyunggu had believed that everything would be okay.

_Okay._

He’s learnt what an ugly word that is,  _okay_ , as though his life could be absolved. As if he could have been saved.

There is no redemption for him, just an eternity of wandering in the dark.

There isn’t an okay for him, not for his story with no ending.

On most days when Yuto got quiet- the silence settling in him like stones in the sea- Hyunggu wasn’t so worried. He’d loved his reticence and the way he saw more than he said. Hyunggu understood him perfectly because he’s spent so long without anyone hearing his voice.

Tonight Yuto’s silence is unsettling. He’s known for a while, of course, that Yuto’s curiosities would lead them to  _this._ If there is one thing Hyunggu’s learnt about secrets is that they never lasted.

Hyunggu had truly believed that his secret would never be revealed. 

Because his love had blindsided him, had come unannounced in the middle of the night. It had come when he’d given up asking for it to come.

It’s a miracle and Hyunggu had thought that that was the way for him to heal.

Tonight he’ll know that he was wrong all along.

He brings Yuto to where his secret lay, buried ten feet into the ground with all the dirt and grime and death surrounding it like a coffin. A story to be forgotten as time passed, a secret that would have remained buried.

Just like the rest of him.

Forever.

“Hyunggu,” Yuto starts to say and his  _everything_ shatters into particles so small they disappear, Hyunggu is broken and torn and he’s about to lose everything again.

It’s his fate, he believes, to never know life.

Hyunggu’s been beaten and broken too many times to remember, has had his bones crushed and reshaped and his soul torn from him over and over and over again. 

So why, so why is it that this time it’s cutting deeper? Breaking him with more force than the universe combined?

He releases Yuto’s hand- always warm, always solid, always delicate. Every time Yuto held his hands he knew things were going to be alright, that he wasn’t about to be crushed by the weight of his own blackened cries.

And in a way, letting go of Yuto’s hand was his way of slowly letting him go as well.

“I think you’ve always known,” Hyunggu’s voice is thickly laced with tears, his chest tightening into a fist, “You just never asked.”

“Hyunggu,” Yuto says again and he wants to scream,  _don’t call my name with so much love in it. I am not someone who can be loved_ _,_ but he doesn’t say anything, he lets Yuto’s voice ring in his ears like a distant bell, “What are you saying?”

“Let me,” it’s so painful,  _fuck,_ it’s so painful it’s killing him all over again, “Tell you a story.”

Yuto grows silent and Hyunggu lets the thickness between them fester like a fog. 

It’s all going to end. Right now.

Tonight.

Hyunggu will blink and Yuto will be gone and everything will be back to how it used to be before- Hyunggu wandering the earth aimlessly while Yuto carried on with his life, with warmth in his fingertips and a beating heart and a smile on his lips.

“There was a boy,” Hyunggu looks over the flowers,  _his flowers_ , “Who loved with arms full of hope and a heart that beat like there was a forever.”

He feels Yuto’s heavy gaze on his face, but he keeps his eyes ahead. Focused.

“He’d loved someone, of course. And he thought that it was okay to love and be loved, because what’s the harm in that?”

Hyunggu can’t remember his face anymore and in his head it’s just a vaguely built image of the boy he’d once loved with a mouthful of forevers. The vague image distorts and it’s Yuto.

Hyunggu doesn’t think he’ll ever stop loving Yuto, but he’s going to have to try.

“But in his love he hadn’t... he didn’t care about the world around him. Just lovers- destined for eternity with the sun scorching their wings. A burning image of love.”

Yuto’s lips part, a question ready to fall out but Hyunggu cuts through it quickly, “He was limitless. The wind beneath his wings, but his love wasn’t meant to be. He died,” and Hyunggu’s breath hitches, the moon coming into view.

When he turns to face Yuto, he comes undone.

Because Hyunggu’s been dead for years, he’s been dead for twenty years buried deep under the earth and where they stand overlooking the flowers- _his flowers_ \- he knows that his bones lay there. 

He’s never been able to leave this garden. Accursed to wander it forever, watching the world go by without him.

“It wasn’t the sun that killed Icarus,” Hyunggu whispers as fear contorts Yuto’s face, his golden skin turning a sickly shade of white that mirrored his own, “It was the sea he was sent to.”

“Y-you,” Yuto’s lips are shaking, his hands are shaking.

Hyunggu’s seen himself in the water’s reflection before. He knows that his eyes are hollow and black and his skin is purple and bruised.

He knows that in the back of his head his skull is bashed in, shattered and his blood’s staining the collar of his shirt a rich crimson. 

When moonlight kisses his skin, he comes completely undone.

“I wish you had met me when I still had light in my eyes, that love was something I desired and didn’t hide from, that I didn’t always question your motives with everything you say. I wish you were my first so you could experience a completely different me, but that’s not going to happen. And I’m sorry.”

 _Because I’ve been dead twenty years._    

The fear in Yuto’s eyes are tearing him apart and he feels his love evaporate right before his eyes like a cloud of smoke. But Hyunggu knows, he knows that no matter how much Yuto loved him his secret was going to destroy everything between them.

Falling in love with a ghost? Impossible .

Even then, even with knowing that Yuto’s frightened and that their love is doomed, he reaches out for his lover. For one final touch, one final kiss.

One final attempt at putting out the fires burning in his soul destroying him.

But as his hands reach out, Yuto jerks back, his eyes wide and dark and trembling. He’d done that, he’d put the fear in his eyes.

“Yuto,” 

And he runs, skidding in his steps and tripping and Hyunggu watches as Yuto runs away from him into the dead of night, into the stars that shone like diamonds above them. He runs even as the skies crack open and the tears begin to fall.

Hyunggu collapses like a thousand questions, drops his head into his hands and screams even as the thunder claps and drowns it out. There is no one to hear him, because he is nothing but a ghost with the subtle presence of air.

He is nothing but a distant memory, a forgotten story. A lover who lost everything time and time and again. 

Hyunggu grieves, for himself, for his life. For the bones that were never to be found. But above all, he grieves because he knows he cannot heal.

\-----


	10. Chapter 10

Yan An takes his pulse, pressing his fingers firmly over the throbbing veins in his wrist. Yuto can see the concentration etched into the corners of Yan An’s eyes, with the way his lips press together and his brows crease in the softest way, almost like blended pastels.

“Anymore blackouts?” he asks, gaze cutting to meet Yuto’s because he knows that the other boy’s about to say  _no_.

_“No._ _”_

“Yes then,” Yan An lets go of him and picks up his notepad, begins to scribble something down quickly, “Bad dreams?”

“No?”

Yan An writes something else down, Yuto watches the way his hands jerk with the stroke of his every word. He writes like he’s ticking checkboxes- methodical and precise.

“You know, I didn’t come here for a diagnosis,” Yuto says, feeling strangely small and out of place in Yan An’s dorm room. Yuto doesn’t often visit the others’ rooms, unless of course, he was feeling some sort of internal crisis.

And he certainly was. Because he’s been in love with a fucking  _dead_ person for months and the revelation’s still shaking him like someone’s shoved a motor into his system. It shouldn’t be possible, it has to be an elaborate joke.

But he can’t forget the way Hyunggu’s face had changed when the moonlight had kissed his skin. His eyes had been rimmed black, his lips grey and bruised and bloody. 

There had been blood all over his clothes, staining the fabric from his collar all the way down his chest. Yuto’s never seen ghosts before- and  _heck_ he’s terrified of them- but seeing Hyunggu that way had frightened him mindless. His first reaction was to run away, to run despite the obvious pain in Hyunggu’s eyes, to run despite all the voices in his head telling him to stay, to reach out and touch Hyunggu and listen to what was left of his dead heart.

He’d taken off anyway, an instinctual response and he’d kept running until he was back in his room, safe and sound. 

And then he’d collapsed like a million secrets have come unfolded.

“I know you didn’t,” Yan An says with a twist of his lips. He’s got that  _you’re-an-idiot-and-as-your-hyung-I-have-to-talk-some-sense-into-you_ look plastered across his face like an oversized sticker. Yuto wants to reach out and rip it off, “But you look like death.”

Yuto winces.

“When was the last time you had a proper meal?”

Yuto opens his mouth to answer but Yan An cuts him off swiftly, “And when was the last time you drew? Or slept properly? He’ll, Adachi,” everyone seemed to refer to him as  _Adachi_ when they were frustrated with him, it’s laughable really, but Yuto’s feeling (has been feeling) like he’s lost all spirit within him so he can’t bring himself to even smile, “You look like you’re dead.”

 _You look like you’re dead,_ Yuto wants to say, _“But have you seen Hyunggu?”_

Yuto still remembers Hyunggu against his skin. His body remembers his soft breath against him, the crevices and dips of his hands and mouth and teeth. Even if Yuto wants to forget him, his body doesn’t. Because Hyunggu’s latched on to him like second skin and it’s become almost like an instinct to be with him. If his brain were to die, his body would remember Hyunggu. 

It wasn’t a poltergeist in Hyunggu’s eyes. It had been death, it had been secrets. How many times had it killed him over and over and over to keep this from Yuto?

_How much did he love you in order to keep you?_

Yuto still loves him, still breathes for him and he can’t let go. Staying away from him, spending nights thinking over this and calming his tepid heart had done nothing but miss the way Hyunggu smiled with his eyes and laughed with his heart and made Yuto feel like all the missing parts of his life were put together again. Hyunggu put Yuto together.

He was the warmth Yuto’s always desired, he was the love Yuto’s spent so long looking for in others.

He flips his hands over, staring into his palms. He remembers the press of Hyunggu’s hands in them like they’d just been touching.

“If you had a fallout with your boyfriend,” Yan An says, “You should sort it out with him.”

It wouldn’t be easy. It wasn’t something like lost feelings or insecurity or one of them cheating on the other. How would anyone react to finding out that the love of their life wasn’t  _human?_ That he’d died over twenty years before, his bones buried so deep into the ground you’d need an excavation to free them?

How would you react knowing that in all of the world you’re the only one who remembered him? That he’d probably spent years wandering the earth, unseen and trembling and dismal because he was jealous of all the people who could live? Who could feel the sun against their skin and glow from within?

Yuto’s heart shatters into a million unidentifiable pieces.

Yan An sighs and Yuto begins to rub his thumb against the middle of his palms. His fingers shake.

“Yuto, this isn’t healthy.” 

“This isn’t any of your business Yan An,” Yuto barks, annoyed and upset and shattering on the inside. He can solve his own problems, he knows that over time he’ll forget about Hyunggu and everything would go back to how it did before they even met, eventually Yuto’s soul would stop longing for that damned poltergeist. Yan An’s eyes widen a fraction, hurt filling them and Yuto feels bad so he adds a weary, “Hyung.” belatedly.

Tension crackles like a whip between them for a few moments, choking and squeezing Yuto like he’s being caged. And he supposes he is because Yan An’s observing him with that bloody  _doctor's_  gaze, as though trying to diagnose him and treat him. Yuto knows he’s only doing this out of concern and care for him, but Yuto’s too tired to want to deal with any of this.

Every night when he closes his eyes he sees Hyunggu’s death. Every night when he tries to sleep he hears Hyunggu whisper, _“Please.”_

Yuto pulls his lips into his mouth, bites down so hard he tastes metallic blood against his lips.

He lets go because the stinging mirrors the one in his heart. 

_I wish you had met me when I still had that light in my eyes._

He scrubs his face red.

“Yuto,” Yan An’s voice is softer, closer and he feels the older boy’s gentle hands settle on his shoulders. He’s warm and sticky like honey.

Like Hyunggu had been. Even though he was chilly he warmed Yuto’s life.

“Yuto breathe.”

It’s hard to control his breaths, it’s hard to control anything and the tears come pathetically like rain that wasn’t predicted and he crashes and burns- skidding across roads he doesn’t want to cross. It comes like a jagged cut, ripping him up from the inside.

He keeps thinking about Hyunggu’s eyes, his voice, his mouth, his laugh, his hands, his light, his fire. 

And oh how Yuto had burned.

“Yuto,” he can feel Yan An’s arms wrap around him, hear his tepid heart press flush against his ear, “Don’t cry.”

He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to cry but he doesn’t know how to stop either. 

The words come crashing out of his mouth like uncontrollable waves, “I love him. I love him. I love him.”

_So much, so much, so much._

“I know,” Yan An soothes, his voice like a song Yuto needed to hear, “It’s going to be okay.”

 _No it’s not_ , Yuto thinks,  _I’m here and Hyunggu’s bones are in the ground._

“Go talk to him,” Yan An urges, “Work it out. Yuto,” he tugs at his chin, lifting wet eyes to meet his, “That boy probably loves the fuck out of you too. And I don’t know what happened between the both of you, but I know that if you hauled your ass out of this self-depredation and went to see him you’ll work it out.”

“Hyung,”

“Trust me,” Yan An smiles and it’s bright like the damned sun- he’s always smiling like the damned sun- “And stop crying. You know what Changgu would do if he saw you like this.”

Yuto laughs, a small half-sob-half-laugh because he  _can_ imagine what Changgu would do. He’d probably call him a fake aquarius and tell him he shouldn’t even be a Virgo. “Jesus, you’re a Cancer now too?” he’d say.

God,  _god._ He’s a mess and he knows he can’t go on like this. He can’t keep worrying Wooseok either, because he knows that this sudden habit of waking up to warm coffee had less to do with friendship and more to do with being troubled. He also knows Changgu’s not-so-subtle bumping into him at corridors after classes and during breaks was not much coincidence and more of checking up on him to make sure he’s not dead or wallowing.

Yuto’s felt dead for weeks, but Yan An’s efforts to cheer him up is making him feel a lot better.

In fact for the first time since the truth, Yuto doesn’t feel sad or empty. He feels angry, feels the righteous anger claw its way into his veins, painting his system an obscure shade of black.

He is fucking  _livid._

Hyunggu couldn’t have just died. He’d been killed.

Someone had killed the love of his life. Yuto’s not an angry person and it would take a lot to even annoy him but he feels this rage like it’s been growing inside of him for years, finally ripening a brilliant crimson.

 _I must avenge him,_ he vows. Something in his expression must have changed because Yan An’s eyes become bothered, his lips parting as if to say something.

This time Yuto cuts him off, going “I know what to do now hyung.”

Yan An doesn’t get to say anything because Yuto’s smiling and it’s not soft or sweet.

It’s terrifying; all teeth and delirium.

\-----

Hyunggu’s breath catches when he sees Yuto approaching him, gait strong and jaw set and brows pulled together. His breath catches because Yuto looks so _goddamn_ beautiful like this.

His hands are shaking, violently at that.

Hyunggu wants to say many things, wants to tell Yuto that he doesn’t have to be here. That they don’t have to see each other anymore. That time will heal his wounds. Time would heal Hyunggu’s too.

But above all he wants to tell Yuto that he’s sorry, that he should have stopped before he let his heart win him over.

Hyunggu wants to say so many things but his mouth doesn’t taste like the truth anymore and he wonders how many monsters he’s created on his tongue by now.

There’s all this blood on Hyunggu’s hands that he can’t seem to wash off and he doesn’t want to touch Yuto because he doesn’t want to stain him. It wouldn’t be fair to him.

But as Yuto approaches and his heart belatedly soars, he reminds himself of what he is.

Dead. A ghost.

Meant to wander the earth for eternity, with nobody to hold on to and nobody to touch and nobody to remember.

Truth is, Hyunggu doesn’t want to let Yuto go. He knows that once he does he’d be gone forever, that in Yuto’s heart he would close the door to him and burn it down with fire and ash and replace it with tombstones with his name written on it.

Yuto would move on but Hyunggu would be stuck mourning, where his dreams, love, hope, life and all the memories they’d built together would eventually fade with the seasons. Yuto will live to a hundred and Hyunggu would always remain twenty years old.

The wind picks up, releasing dried leaves into the air and filling the garden with the sickly sweet scent of flowers. Hyunggu should be running from Yuto but he can’t move, can barely breathe.

And when Yuto reaches him, his chest rising and falling like the dip and rise of Hyunggu’s heart, the last thing he expects is to be kissed.

Because Yuto kisses him and it’s not soft and gentle, it’s rough and desperate and Hyunggu’s hands are in his hair and down his neck and on his jaw and he  _needs, he needs, he needs_ to be filled with fire and warmth. 

The weeks without Yuto had felt like millions of years and suddenly it’s like Hyunggu’s alive again because Yuto is here, Yuto is with him and he has loved him with all the force of the galaxies, and he will love him more.

This kiss is just that, the words that couldn’t be said. The longing, the sorrow.

The emptiness when they weren’t together. And Hyunggu lets himself be selfish, lets himself take and give and feel and rise like there is a furnace burning inside of his chest. Yuto is warm and real and alive and he can feel the ferocious beat of his heart drum underneath his icy fingers.

Yuto is the most beautiful thing on the planet and Hyunggu wasn’t going to argue with that. 

When they pull away, breathless and red with lips swollen like berries, Hyunggu can’t stop thinking about the way Yuto’s eyes looked both sad and happy at the same time: a demon battling within him.

Hyunggu wants him to stay as much as he wants to let him go.

But not yet, not now. Hyunggu is selfish and he wants Yuto all to himself. Even if it was for a minute longer.

“I love you,” Yuto says and it settles heavily against Hyunggu, stinging more than soothing, “I love you Kang Hyunggu.”

The dam breaks and he feels Yuto pull him to his chest. He’s strong and firm and alive and Hyunggu can feel the flutter of his heartbeat like a caged bird.

He curls his fingers around the edges of Yuto’s shirt, holding him in place because he just needs him for another minute. One more minute and then he’ll say goodbye for good, one more minute and he’ll let go forever.

But Yuto says, “Tell me your story.”

Hyunggu wants to let go but he can’t. He can’t when Yuto pulls away, rubbing his tears with his thumbs and then says, “It’s okay, I’m not leaving you.”

So Hyunggu brings him to  _his flowers,_ all bloomed and beautiful, their roots curling deeply into the soil but not enough to touch his bones. He wishes he’d died beautifully.

So he tells Yuto that he’d died in the winter, when the sky was grey and clouds threaded through the horizon like someone had pulled cotton balls apart.

Killed, more specifically, because he’d loved someone he shouldn’t have and had to be dealt with.

The Gardener had come up behind him, smashed his head right in with a baseball bat. Hyunggu remembers the world spinning off its axis, remembers dying like he’d just been killed the day before. He remembers falling into the snow, feeling the ice beneath him warm up with blood.

He remembers reaching out with shaking fingers, tears in his eyes and obsidian dots scattered across his vision, he’d begged for mercy.

“Please,” he’d said, Yuto tenses, “Please don’t kill me.”

 _Let me live,_ he couldn’t make out,  _I deserve to live._

He remembers dying slowly, the pain leaving his body slowly, tiredness taking over like a strong drug. He’d lost sensation in his legs first, then his hands and then he’d fallen asleep because that’s all he could manage. It was hard to breathe, hard to keep his eyes open.

He’d woken up later, standing nearby as he watched the gardener dig up the ground and kick his body in. He’d watched as the earth came over his dead flesh.

Over time flowers were planted and they grew beautifully. He became a distant memory, constantly running from The Gardener even though he knew he couldn’t be seen.

Yuto reaches for his hands, Hyunggu notices how much they’re shaking. For the first time he’s not the trembling one so he holds on to Yuto’s fingers firmly.

He says, “When I say I’m not good for you I mean it. And,” he sucks in a breath, “Don’t tell me I’m perfect in your eyes, because I’m not. I’m a ghost, Yuto. Dead, gone. Being with me will kill you slowly from the inside. You’ll grow older and you’ll move on. But me? I’ll always stay the same. I’ll always be trapped inside of this garden. I can never be human, Yuto. And I don’t want to be.”

“I know,” Yuto says wearily, “You think I don’t realise that? That I haven’t spent  _weeks_ thinking this over?”

“This relationship is doomed,” Hyunggu says, lifting Yuto’s hands- a painter’s hand, a firm hand- and maps out the constellations in his palms, “I’ll always be too cold for you to shine your way through.”

“That’s not true,” Yuto argues softly, his gaze flitting away, “So don’t give up. Not yet- I...”

Hyunggu sees The Gardener emerge in the distance, it’s dark out and the gardens are empty, but he still feels the fear score through him like a blade.

Yuto’s eyes lock on The Gardener at the same time, and when Hyunggu says he’s never seen rage so red and murderous before he means it. Even when The Gardener had sent him to his death, he hadn’t looked like a demon.

Yuto did. Yuto looked like he had hell in his eyes and labyrinthine hatred burning in himself. Hyunggu tries to stop him but Yuto jumps to his feet, his face contorting into menace.

And he’s running even before Hyunggu can tell him to stop.

\-----

Yuto’s dreams are how Hyunggu died.

He’d realised before Hyunggu had told him and he hadn’t expected it to make him feel as enraged as it did. Yuto thinks devils exist, he has drawn them out of the eyes of his subjects and put them into his art pieces. He has hung up canvases filled with demons lurking in people for the world to see.

But there is a certain evil, he reckons, a certain evil that should never be allowed to live and breathe.

So as his lungs burned with rage burning scarlet and as his legs propelled him into madness he lurches, coming to a halt in front of The Gardener.

The old man regards him with blithe nonchalance, his chin tipping upwards and his gaze dipping. Yuto shadows him, but The Gardener had a darkness to him that even Yuto couldn’t obscure.

“You killed him,” Yuto wheezes, his jaw tightening so much the bone threatens to pop, “You killed him didn’t you?”

The Gardener looks at him placidly, locking his arms behind his back. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, boy.”

He turns away, gaze tilted to the sky.

It’s perturbing to see how at ease the bastard was, that he could go on with his entire life knowing fully well that he’d taken the life of someone else. That he could go about his days experiencing the world around him the way Hyunggu couldn’t.

What had Hyunggu’s mistake been? Loving his son with all his heart?

Did he have to die for that?

“Kang Hyunggu,” Yuto proclaims with every ounce of hatred smouldering in his soul, “His name  _is_ Kang Hyunggu and you killed him.”

Yuto watches The Gardener tense.

“I’m telling someone!” he forewarns, “I’m going to call the police.”

“And then what?”

Yuto’s taken aback, brows furrowing. 

The Gardener turns around, his beady black eyes meeting Yuto’s as though there was a joke being shared between them.

“And then what? What is your proof?”

Yuto’s lips part, fumble.

The Gardener laughs, waving his hand dismissively, “You should know who you’re talking to,  _boy._ Call the police. Call anyone you want. But you,” he grins so wide Yuto thinks his face is about to split into two, “Cannot prove I did anything.”

He starts to walk away.

“I’ll prove it,” Yuto resonates, “Watch me, you fucking bastard.”

The Gardener turns ever so slightly, “Try your hardest.”

Yuto curls his fingers into fists, his nails biting into his skin so hard he feels the warmth of blood. He’s going to prove it, he’s going to get this fucker arrested.

He’s going to avenge Kang Hyunggu.

Yuto twists around, heading for the entrance. He’s fumbling for his phone, ready to call Wooseok for backup. He can solve it with Wooseok, he can find ocular proof. There is no way this murder is  _that clean._  

Hyunggu’s story should not be forgotten. _He_ should not be forgotten.

But as he’s about to call Wooseok, he hears Hyunggu scream his name- a loud bloodcurdling cry and he stops, eyes widening.

He twists around- his sports instincts kicking in the last minute- at just the right moment to grab on to the lifted wrists of The Gardener.

There it is, the anger and murder in his gaze. This is the man who’d condemned Hyunggu to an eternity of wandering around the earth listlessly.

This is the man who’d stolen his life from him.

Yuto locks his feet firmly, using it as stability while holding The Gardener’s wrists above his face. He has no weapon and nothing to defend himself with.

He’ll have to use his fists if he wanted to escape.

“You know what he looked like,” The Gardener begins to laugh, his spit flying all over the place and in his eyes insanity lingered like a parasite, “When he died?”

“Fuck you,” Yuto bites, pushing back. The Gardener is surprisingly strong and his arms are beginning to grow weak.

“He cried so much,” The Gardener chuckles, “Help me! Help me please!”

“Shut up!” 

“I killed my own son,” The Gardener’s laughing now, like this was all some elaborate joke to him, “You think I wouldn’t kill you too?”

Yuto screams, pushing back. The Gardener loses balance, tripping but recovers quickly. 

Yuto’s vision goes black when The Gardener’s fist connects with his face, the impact twisting him around. In the distance he can hear Hyunggu scream.

The Japanese boy doesn’t back down though, going back at The Gardener with equal force, pushing him with everything that he has within him. The anger’s ripe and breathing within him, taking over his body like a malignant spirit. Yuto kicks and The Gardener goes down with a huff of pain.

He’d killed his own son. He’d killed Hyunggu. This bastard had to die, that was the only way to avenge Hyunggu. He had to die with blood and fire and his screams echoing into the night with no one to help him.

Something dangerous and terrible snaps in Yuto.

He keeps swinging, his fists meeting flesh and bone, blood staining his knuckles and tearing his skin apart. He can’t stop, he can’t stop because he keeps thinking of Hyunggu dying, his lips blue and eyes losing hope and he’s breaking over and over and over again because Hyunggu had an entire life ahead of him- unfulfilled dreams and ambitions that he could have accomplished.

Hyunggu with the smile as bright as the sun. Hyunggu with the poltergeist in his eyes.

Hyunggu the love of his life.

So Yuto keeps bringing his fists down against The Gardener’s face, breaking into his nose and his cheekbones and his jaw and the crazy fuck keeps laughing with blood in his mouth and in his teeth, dripping down his chin in thick glops. 

“Yuto!” Hyunggu’s voice is clearer now, he can feel his icy hands against his shoulders trying to pull him back, “Yuto don’t kill him!”

He doesn’t stop because the adrenaline is kicking in in full gear.

“You’ll be no better than him!” Hyunggu screams with all the force of the world.

Yuto stops abruptly, his chest rising and falling like the crashing sea. The Gardener’s all broken beneath him, his face torn and dripping with crimson.

He’d done this, he’d fucking done this.

Fresh terror ignites within him and he falls away, eyes wide and frightened.

_I’m a monster._

“Yuto,” Hyunggu drops in front of him, but his face is far away. All Yuto can look at is the unconscious body of The Gardener, “Yuto, look at me. Please just look at me.”

Yuto can’t. He can’t look into Hyunggu’s eyes knowing what he’d just done.

“Look at me damn it!”

Yuto’s gaze is blurry when he stares blankly into Hyunggu’s moonlit face. He’s not terrified or angry, just sombre and he brings his hands to dab at the blood rolling down Yuto’s lips, then dabbing at his nosebridge with trembling fingers where the skin’s been split open, “Breathe. Yuto, breathe.”

“I,” he wheezes, “I’m a monster.”

“No you’re not,” Hyunggu whispers, presses his forehead to Yuto’s, “Look at me. Only me.”

So Yuto does. Hyunggu has stardust running through his veins, blessed with power. He can turn the tides with just the click of his fingers and bring an end to wars with just a look. There is so much magic and promises locked inside of his bones.

He’s a child of the cosmos. He is so important, he is so special.

“You’re not a monster. You’re mine,” Hyunggu says and it’s almost like a prayer, “Go home. Sleep it off.”

Yuto nods, even though everything within him is shaking, he nods. He gets to his feet unsteadily, his knees cracking and his legs failing him. He gathers himself desperately, at least what’s left of him.

But before he can move, Hyunggu’s screaming his name and he turns around for a second, barely able to breathe before the world crashes into blackness.

\-----

Neko crawls over Yuto’s lap, which he thinks the cat does just to annoy him. (There’s something about the feline that seemed to  _understand_ that he didn’t like cat fur all over his ripped black jeans but didn’t care).

Every time Yuto came remotely close to chiding the cat it would hop from him to Hyunggu and it’s universally known that the boy had the softest spot for the ungrateful feline.

In the distance they watch as The Gardener hobbles around, his face a battered mess. Yuto had did a number on him- broken nose, broken teeth, broken flesh. To anyone who asked the bastard would say that he’d fallen on a rock while working. 

To Yuto, he’d gotten what he’d deserved.

With sunlight streaming through the cracks of leaves on trees and warmth on his skin, Yuto lifts his face to the sky. He lets it wash over him, cleansing him and filling him with comfort. Beside him Hyunggu shifts, his hands coming over to cover his.

And it’s warm, almost burning against his. Yuto flips his hand over to hold on to it, letting Hyunggu’s skin melt against his own like chocolate.

He’s a burning furnace and by god, he will burn for more.

They are two parts to a whole: moiety. Yuto doesn’t think anyone fits him better than the energetic and smiley Kang Hyunggu with his once trembling hands and poltergeist in his eyes.

They’re working on that, the poltergeist. They’re working on slowly removing its grasp on Hyunggu and it will take some time because Hyunggu thinks that Yuto’s going to leave him. That his secrets will catch up to him even though they’ve been revealed already.

Every time Yuto kisses him he can taste the fear in his mouth and every time they kiss Yuto reminds Hyunggu that he doesn’t think he can ever stop loving him.

Because they are two parts of a whole.

Yuto holds on to Hyunggu with both hands, will continue to hold him like he is holding on to bits of his own broken soul. 

And Hyunggu will live forever. He will live in the corners of Yuto’s eyes, in the tip of his mouth. He will live in the taste of his tongue, in the curves of his skin. Hyunggu will live forever as long as Yuto does and that is eternal.

Yuto will always love him.

It used to be like this: Hyunggu belonged to Hyunggu and Yuto belonged to Yuto. But somewhere along the line, as it came and went, when Hyunggu grinned and laughed and loved, Yuto stopping becoming Yuto. He became Hyunggu’s without them knowing a single thing. 

Hyunggu leaves impressions on his chest, in his words, in his hands. And Yuto will always attempt to rescue him from the fires that he’s caged himself in. Hyunggu’s never let anyone touch him in twenty years but Yuto’s somehow made it through the vines and cut him free.

Ashes will never burn on their lips, not as long as they are together and Yuto will never quit on Hyunggu.

“I love yellow flowers,” Hyunggu says, switching positions so that his ear’s pressed into Yuto’s thigh, they overlook the entire gardens, watching people come and go. From where they are no one can see them, no one can find them. The only ones to find each other is themselves, “There’s just something about them that reminds me that there’s a little light in the dark.”

Yuto laughs, resting a palm against Hyunggu’s hair, feeling the silky strands beneath his palms and fingers, “We’re going to be okay.”

“Yeah,” Hyunggu agrees. He doesn’t sound forlorn or hopeless. This time when they speak with a mouthful of forevers, they know that everything  _okay_ isn’t a lie, “We’re going to be just fine.”

Yuto smiles. “I love you Kang Hyunggu.”

There is a tale to them with a happy ending.

 _You and I._ Forever.

And as Yuto closes his eyes and allows the sun to touch his face like a lost lover, as he feels Hyunggu’s softness against him, as he listens to the people around the garden.

As The Gardener struggles to move and breathe, as Yuto  _exists_.

He’s happy just like this and there is nothing he could ever ask for that could possibly be any better than being together with the boy he loved eternally. They have both known loss like the sharp edges of a knife and lived with lips more scar than skin.

And that’s the miracle. He will love Hyunggu when he is a still day and he will love him when he’s a hurricane.

Because their love is forever, _they_ are forever.

He knows he is buried where Hyunggu’s bones lay. _His_ _flowers_ turning into _T_ _heirs._ And maybe no one will find them and maybe someone will and maybe no one will remember them in a few years and maybe someone will.

But that’s okay. It is _all okay._

And Yuto realises just how beautiful that word is; okay.

\-----

THE END

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you guys enjoyed this! (See I told you it’s a happy ending!) Also did y’all pick out the hints written throughout the chapters? 
> 
> But above all, thank you so much for reading this story!


End file.
